The Big Short Summary

1401 Words3 Pages

The Big Short by Michael Lewis takes place in the early 2000s, with an investor named Michael Burry. He is a medical doctor with only one eye is socially awkward and has a tough time interacting with people, but at the same time he is a well-respected investor. He makes a monumental discovery that the U.S. housing market is about to collapse and during the past few decades, the largest banks in America have made it a normal thing to bundle together Americans' home mortgages into bonds known as CDOs. During the past few decades those banks have been trading them for higher and higher prices. On the opposite spectrum those bonds and loans have been having lesser and lesser quality, which meant that many of the CDOs will go bad. All of those bad loans and bonds are now becoming subprime mortgages and at alarming rates, the big banks and even smaller banks are targeting people who can’t afford them and other members of the working class. They began to persuade them in with low interest rates but with only the intention to hike up the prices after a short grace period. The worst part about this hole dilemma isn’t totally about loans themselves either, it’s about the people who are being taken for a ride. The people paying for these loans …show more content…

When I was reading this, I didn’t exactly know what a credit default swap was but when I did some research on it I found that it is basically a bet with the banks, meaning that Michael Burry had to pay the bank each month that the CDOs maintained their value and the bank would pay him each month that their value diminished. Michael Burry in my opinion when reading this is a savant. The amount of math that this guy had to do and check was off the charts, and with all those calculations he figured that all the investments in the CDOs would start to pay off pretty close to 2007 or

More about The Big Short Summary

Open Document