1. After reading The Big
Short, do you have a clearer understanding of the Wall Street
collapse of 2008? Does Michael Lewis do a good job, or a poor one, of
explaining the arcane financial devices and the ins and outs of the bond
markets? Did you find it interesting? Or were you bored to tears?
2. Follow-up to Question 2: How much did you know about financial
crisis before reading The Big Short? What have you learned since
that confirmed, or deviated from, your prior understanding of the events
of 2008?
3. Where, or on whom, does Michael Lewis place blame for the events
leading up to the crash?
4. What role did the rating agencies play—Moody's, Standard & Poor's,
and Fitch? Were they at fault, or was the system such that they were
forced to become unwilling partners?
5. Talk about the mortgage initiators. What role did they play? Discuss
the array of mortgages offered and how they destabilized the system.
6. Steve Eisman, Mike Burry, and the men who ran the "garage band hedge
fund" made huge fortunes off the downfall of others. Do you see them as
prophetic heroes, greedy opportunists...or something else? How does
Lewis portray them?
7. Follow-up to Question 6: Why did a handful of outsiders
foresee what would happen with the subprimes while neither the heads of
the large financial firms nor government regulators saw what was coming?
Do you think it was genuine ignorance (the derivatives were simply too
obscure to understand) or willful ignorance (no one really wanted to
turn off the money spigot)? What about the risk managers for the Wall
Street firms—where were they in all of this?
8. Another way to approach this book is to think of it almost as a
mystery: who know how much...and when did they know it?
* Some questions from
LitLovers.com