The credit crunch with jokes

Unlike most financial writers, who are too serious for their own good, Michael Lewis has a sense of humour and he deploys it deftly. In Liar’s Poker, his semi-autobiographical account of the Salomon Brothers bond desk published 20 years ago, the traders always explain a market move they do not understand by blaming it on ‘the Arabs’. At once, we realise that the Masters of the Universe do not always know what they were talking about.

In The Big Short, Lewis examines the credit crunch through the eyes of a handful of ‘short-sellers’, who not only saw it all coming, but put their money where their mouths were by placing bets that the boom would go bust. Lewis also makes this tale digestible with little vignettes. In 2007, for instance, he tells us that the big players in the mortgage industry held a conference in the sober-suited setting of Las Vegas.