Michael Lewis
speaker
11,580 appearances
71 recordings
16 series
first heard Sep 2020
last heard 23 Jun
Michael Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 64 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 44.
Appearances
Get The Big Short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
All right, so you've got to know a little bit about what happened.
Very broadly, the big Wall Street banks, which were at the time exciting places to work, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and all the rest were thought to be the smart places in the financial world.
And these places made hundreds of billions of dollars of really stupid bets.
You can think of the world back then as having organized itself around a bet.
And the bet was on subprime mortgage bonds, which was in turn a bet on what was gonna happen to house prices.
And the Wall Street firms were all, almost all, really heavily on the wrong side of the bet.
They owned a lot of this stuff.
And not only because they had bought the actual loans, they used derivatives to replicate the absolute worst of them.
So it's like the stupidest loans, in theory, replicate them infinitely.
And so not only did we have like hundreds of billions of really dumb loans, but you had possibly infinite number of similarly stupid bets, all kind of concentrated in the heart of the financial system.
On the other side of this,
were a handful of smart people who took the other side of the bets.
And my book, The Big Short, tells the story of the financial crisis through the eyes of the people who were on the right side of the bet.
All right, the market wakes up to how bad these loans are.
The banks all basically would have failed.
Even the ones that didn't go all in on it, where they were so tied to the other banks.
The whole financial system was going down, like bankrupt.
If this had happened in 1929 before the Federal Reserve grew a pair, it would have been just depression.
It would have been 35% unemployment.
Showing 5401–5420 of 11,580 · page 271 of 579
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