The short version: a butterfly flaps its wings in Wall Street and the world falls over.
The long?
Complex financial instruments, not the most foreboding harbingers of doom but therein lies the trick. They most certainly delivered when it came to wrecking the global economy back in the mid to late noughties at any rate. This book is the real life tale of an opaque and seemingly distant world to most of us, one where a few numbers going the wrong way can have profound and wide-ranging effects on the world beyond. It shines a light on one part of that shadowy world and whilst it is tremendously well-written, I don't know if I like the realisation it bestows upon the reader. Namely that those managing such impactful things don't really understand the things they are managing, but there it is regardless.
Excuse the vague layman's terms there, I'm no money man myself but I found it refreshing just how detailed this book was whilst not managing to lose its reader amongst the flurry of financial jargon and murky accounting. It's not a simple account but it doesn't patronise the reader either. Having some knowledge of the impact of the financial crash certainly helps but is not essential, the film is very good too as a broad strokes introduction but there is really no substitute for the wealth of detail and recent history on offer in the book itself.
At the heart of it is debt, bad debt that will probably never be repaid, bad debt packaged and made to look like good debt. It's the story of how some people might look at that and see bad things approaching and take steps to insure themselves against it, making a bet with long odds on what seemed like the distant prospect of failure in the US sub-prime mortgage market. Through many twists and turns, it's the story of greed and stupidity in the great financial institutions who bought into the prevailing good times of the day and either couldn't see or wouldn't see the crumbling foundations it was all built on. At times it feels like a more universal cautionary tale: that those who need the doubt lack it and that those who have the doubt don't get listened to.
It's also an intriguing personal story of some unlikely individuals making headway in a system which largely privileges the grand institutions of finance over the smaller players in the field. There are some nicely nuanced accounts of these individuals and how they came to see what by and large others could not. What saw them through this situation was an eye for detail and willingness to actually look closely at the reality beneath the numbers. This book puts you in the head-space of guys who could see the worst case scenario a mile off and really understand their thought processes as they devised the fail-safes by which they could make money whilst the world lost money in the kind of amounts that only the world could lose. It's a picture that slowly builds with a growing tension and the book does a great job of making you feel like the fly on the wall at some very pivotal moments in the development of this crisis.
That sense of unease is very much the defining trait of this book for me. A slow-burn disaster movie in numbers playing out page by page. It captures a moment in recent history pretty well without reducing some essential complexity. That complexity is really key here as its the point where the book risks losing its reader. In my opinion it treads that line very well but should you find yourself hitting that wall I do urge you to power through it. The most unassuming of things can impact everything, the world spins like a plate and its not always the most competent pair of hands that keep that plate spinning. It's mostly a tragedy with hints of absurd comedy strewn throughout. It's a reminder that the devil is in the detail, that numbers matter and that ingenuity can sometimes pair quite nicely with stupidity. It is, in short, a solid recommendation from myself.
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