The Big Short by Michael Lewis is one of the smartest books I ever read and it rarely meanders. This short history is a careful explanation of an occurrence that was fraught with extremely complicated financial and mathematical models. If you come away feeling like you still don't fully understand credit default swaps and consolidated debt obligations, then you're not alone. (I still don't.) Part of the truth is they were mostly designed to be complicated, and another part is Wall Street was searching for even more creative ways of creating wealth from nothing. It's almost too simplistic to reduce the sub-prime mortgage crisis down to simple explanations such as greed, being uninformed, targeting the lower middle class, fraud, lack of regulation or even a simple loss of values. The truth is much more complicated. I was most intrigued to peer into the daily lives of the types of people who inhabit the Wall Street culture. It seems most of them aren't driven primarily by greed, though need for unbelievable sums of money does play a significant role. It's like they see the financial markets as a game and they want to play, and given this culture possesses the raw power to move and shake the world, it's natural for ambitious people to want to be included. Read this book if you're looking for why the sub-prime mortgage crisis happened. The answer is both routinely boring and really, really frightening.

The characters in this book lead you through the complicated 2008 financial disaster in an interesting way because they figured out what was happening before Wall Street did and were smart enough to bet against the financial industry. I had no idea all that happened and it is worth it for everyone -- investors and tax payers to read the story and learn what happened to the financial industry.

Told in Lewis's storybook fashion, it is very enjoyable to listen to.