The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [0]
Also by Michael Lewis
Home Game
Liar's Poker
The Money Culture
Pacific Rift
Losers
The New New Thing
Next
Moneyball
Coach
The Blind Side
EDITED BY MICHAEL LEWIS
Panic
The Big Short
INSIDE THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE
Michael Lewis
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright (c) 2010 by Michael Lewis
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
ISBN: 978-0-393-07819-0
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For
Michael Kinsley
To whom I still owe an article
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
--Leo Tolstoy, 1897
Contents
Prologue Poltergeist
Chapter 1 A Secret Origin Story
Chapter 2 In the Land of the Blind
Chapter 3 "How Can a Guy Who Can't Speak English Lie?"
Chapter 4 How to Harvest a Migrant Worker
Chapter 5 Accidental Capitalists
Chapter 6 Spider-Man at The Venetian
Chapter 7 The Great Treasure Hunt
Chapter 8 The Long Quiet
Chapter 9 A Death of Interest
Chapter 10 Two Men in a Boat
Epilogue Everything Is Correlated
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
Poltergeist
The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day. I was twenty-four years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. Wall Street's essential function was to allocate capital: to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue. I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as totally preposterous--which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later would come a Great Reckoning, when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds, if not thousands, of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money or persuading other people to make those bets, would be expelled from finance.
When I sat down to write my account of the experience--Liar's Poker, it was called--it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message and stuffing it into a bottle for those who passed through these parts in the far distant future. Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it had happened.
Up to that point, just about everything written about Wall Street had been about the stock market. The stock market had been, from the very beginning, where most of Wall Street lived. My book was mainly about the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts. This, too, I assumed was unsustainable. I thought that I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America, when a great nation lost its financial mind. I expected readers of the future would be appalled that, back in 1986, the CEO of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million as he ran the business into the ground. I expected them to gape in wonder at the story of Howie Rubin, the Salomon mortgage