Aside from This American Life's numerous shows explaining the subprime mortgage crisis, Michael Lewis's The Big Short is the best. Lewis tells the story of our financial armageddon and actually makes it entertaining and mostly understandable. He identifies the main characters of a narrative, makes them heroes, and lets them explain the plot.Writing about what I learned in The Big Short is much more aggravating than reading it. I now understand the basics of CDOs, credit default swaps, shorting a bond/stock/company, subprime mortgages, hedge funds, and the ratings agencies. And I now have a deeper understanding of the depravity, greed, stupidity and laziness of the human race. Lewis explains that the people in charge of the "too big to fail" firms investing consequential sums of money in the subprime mortgage machine, and most of their employees, had no idea what they were doing with this money. When they finally caught on, they had already failed.
I suppose ignorance is more comforting than evil.
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