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
No Heroes, No Villains: The Story of a Murder Trial by Steven Phillips takes the reader behind the scenes of a particular case. This is the story of James Richardson, a black man who was accused of murdering police officer, John Skagen. John Skagen, a white off duty officer, was headed home in the subway system in South Bronx, New York. For reasoning still questionable, he ordered Richardson to get up against the wall with his hands up. While being frisked, Richardson pulled a gun on Skagen and the two exchanged shots. Richardson then escaped the custody of Skagen and headed up the subways stairs firing four shots, two of which hit Skagen in the shoulders. Richardson shouted as he reached the top of the stairs “He’s shooting, a crazy man
In They Say/I Say, Chapter Eighteen is talking all about food, and the long term argument that has been going on forever: What should we eat? There are many good articles in the chapter written by many reliable authors, but there are two of the articles that really stood out. The first one “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate” by Marion Nestle, and the second is “How Junk Food Can End Obesity” by David H. Freedman. Both of these authors talk about the food industry, one talks about how the supermarket effects the choices people make in their diets, and the other talks about how junk food and the fast food industries might just be the way to go to help Americans become healthier.
The year 2008 was a very scary one for anyone involved in the US stock market. Due to subprime lending, and cheap mortgages, the housing market became grossly overinflated. Naturally, as with a balloon that’s filled too much, it “popped”. The resulting collapse of the housing bubble had severe implications for the rest of the US economy, housing, and related industries such as lumber, construction, and realty all came crashing down, and the people employed in those fields soon found themselves out of work. As with the stock market crash of 1929, fear of the economic instability caused people to pull their money out of any investments they had. This can be a problem for a healthy bank, being unable to supply the money people are requesting if it’s tied up in loans. However, this would prove to be an even bigger problem if the money never existed in the first place, and would take down one of the largest scams in American history.
After a generation of portfolio managers and investors profiting from decades of favorable returns on stocks, they believed the modern economy was impervious to major calamities (“Rethinking” 20). As inflation rates fell from record highs in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the record lows that they are today, interest rates followed, enabling Americans to borrow more money from lenders which, in turn, increased housing prices to all-time highs (“Rethinking” 21).
The book Say What You Will is a moving story about two teenagers who are very different from everyone around them and their struggle to get through Senior year. Throughout this book review i’m going to start off by talking about the main characters.
Although the crisis came to head in 2008, there were people who had realized that trouble was coming for years. The largest warning sign was the amount of credit in the market place. Many of the big companies and banks had very little capital, and the lack of capital was brought on by the housing bubble. Companies were lending too much money to people who could not pay them back. And even before people started to default on their mortgages, people could see that this was a problem. During a meeting with the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in January 2007 the staff of the Federal Reserve admitted “that they were aware of [the] problem in the housing issue three years earlier” (Dodd). And they were not the only ones. As far back as 2001 there were people who saw the danger that sub-prime mortgages were and who were trying to have bills passed to stop the bad lending that was going on, but no one wanted to list...
It can be argued that the economic hardships of the great recession began when interest rates were lowered by the Federal Reserve. This caused a bubble in the housing market. Housing prices plummeted, home prices plummeted, then thousands of borrowers could no longer afford to pay on their loans (Koba, 2011). The bubble forced banks to give out homes loans with unreasonably high risk rates. The response of the banks caused a decline in the amount of houses purchased and “a crisis involving mortgage loans and the financial securities built on them” (McConnell, 2012 p.479). The effect on the economy was catastrophic and caused a “pandemic” of foreclosures that effected tens of thousands home owners across the U.S. (Scaliger, 2013). The debt burden eventually became unsustainable and the U.S. crisis deepened as the long-term effect on bank loans would affect not only the housing market, but also the job market.
Meyer compares poems to songs. He says that we have to listen several times a song before we hear it all and before we understand it. The title of a poem provides a sense of what the poem is about. It can tell you about the poem’s subject, tone, and genre. While reading poetry we need to pay attention to elements such as speaker, image, metaphor, symbol, rhyme, and rhythm. Also, Meyer defines doggerel as a “derogatory term used to describe poetry whose subject is trite and whose rhythm and sounds are monotonously heavy-handed”. It is characteristic of children’s game rhymes. In addition, by characterizing poetry as “undefinable” and “unmistakable”, Robinson says that it can have different purposes, subjects, emotions, styles, and forms.
Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson’s Chew On This explores the dark secrets of fast food. The authors first describe the background of fast food and their tactics with customers, and then elaborate on the impact of fast food on society today. Their view on fast food is a negative one: through describing various aspects of fast food, the authors ultimately reveal how the greediness of businessmen has caused the loss of individuality and the growth in power of corporations. They explain the effects of fast food on health, traditions, and animals, clearly showing fast food’s negative impact.
In "thinking outside the idiot box", Dana Stevens responds to Steven Johnson's New York Times article in which Johnson believes that watching television makes you smarter. Indeed, Steven Johnson claimed that television shows have become more and more complex over the years in order to follow the viewers need for an interesting plot instead of an easy, linear story. However, Dana Stevens is opposed to this viewpoint. Stevens is not against television, he does not think it makes you smarter nor that it is poisenous for the brain, he simply states that the viewer should watch television intelligently. That is to say that, viewers should know how much television they should watch and what to watch as well.
Chris Crutcher, author of the short story “Fourth and Too Long”, demonstrates how important it is for players and coaches to have a mutual respect for each other on and off of the field. Over the course of the story, the main character, Benny struggles to find respect for himself as well as the coaches of his high school football team. Identically, the coaches lack respect for him as well. Benny woods is being penalized from playing football due to the length of his hair and his decision not to cut it. In the 1960’s long hair was said to have represented being a member of the hippie community. “It sends a message that the rest of the team can do any damn thing they want. First it’s the hair, then...who knows what”(160) is what Coach Greene
Michael Lewis is the author of “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” and Lewis’ main theme, or the main point, that he is trying to get across is how the 2008 financial crisis came to be, who saw it coming, and how people reacted. Lewis has experience with Wall Street and has worked for Salomon Brothers when he was younger. Today, Lewis is an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. There were three things I highly enjoyed “The Big Short”: the character development, themes, and personalization.
Television has come a long way since it was first introduced. Originally, it was thought that the masses that watch television enjoyed the more simple shows that would tell you exactly what was going on from start to finish. In Steven Johnson’s article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”, Johnson argues that this is actually not the case. In fact, Johnson argues that much more people enjoy shows that involve multi threading, or multiple plots that are all connected.
The Goal is a story about overcoming manufacturing problems that is told through the eyes of a plant manager, Alex Rojo. Alex arrives to work one morning only to discover the division vice-president, Bill Peach, showed up unannounced to see the status of a specific customer order number, discovered the order was incomplete, barked orders at employees to assemble the products, and finally informed Mr. Rojo he has only three months to improve his plant's performance before it's closed because the plant cannot get orders out the door on time. In fact, the order Bill investigated was already seven weeks late and the product not even assembled. After Bill departs, Alex heads to the floor to discover Bill's unexpected arrival has created more problems. The master machinest Bill yelled at before Mr. Rojo arrived quit but only after setting up a machine to complete the seven-week-late order that Bill demanded be shipped out today. The machinest, however, forgot to tighten two adjustment nuts on the machine so several parts must be scrapped, but even worse is that the machine, which just so happens to be the only one of its kind in the plant, is broken.