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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (110222)	4/2/2010 10:22:00 AM
From: riversides	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Michael Lewis — “The Big Short” It’s been on the best-seller list in Canada solidly for the last couple of weeks and the same in the U.S.A., as serial writer Michael Lewis comes up with another significant book. The man who has written such interesting books like “Moneyball”, “The Blind Side”, and “Liars Poker”, takes a look at what created the huge financial mess over the last while. The huge housing bubble that fell apart in the United States and ended up affecting finance of people around the world. It’s a great look at four people in particular who figured out what was coming and managed to get shorts on against the housing bubble and profited immensely...but there are only a few winners. It also takes an interesting look at some of the big brokerage and banking companies where chief executives had no idea what they were risking and continued to cash big paycheques while the gravy train was running. Lewis looks at one trader that somehow cost his firm 6 billion dollars because of the risk that he put on the books, hard to believe. And then of course there is Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the fed who in his term saw two bubbles develop. First the high tech bubble and then the real estate bubble and that real estate bubble did get huge. Lewis mentions, a nanny in New York who owned 4 properties, a stripper in Las Vegas who owned 5. Unfortunately the book is too much involved with CEO’s and trying to explain it, he writes “How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of credit default swap on a double- A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?” Get it? I didn’t think so. Amazon has many of their clients rate their top selling books and currently Americans are rating “The Big Short” as only a 3/5 because of the technical lingo in the book. If you want a great Michael Lewis book maybe try “The Blind Side”.