Monday, March 15, 2010

How Some Of Wall Street's Finest Minds Managed To Destroy $1.75 Trillion Of Wealth In The Subprime Mortgage Markets

CBS News' 60 Minutes reported last night:

  • If you had to pick someone to write the autopsy report on the Wall Street financial collapse 18 months ago, you couldn't do any better than Michael Lewis. He is one of the country's preeminent non-fiction writers with a knack for turning complicated, mind numbing material into fascinating yarns.

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  • His new book, called "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine," comes out later this week and it explains how some of Wall Street's finest minds managed to destroy $1.75 trillion of wealth in the subprime mortgage markets. "60 Minutes" and correspondent Steve Kroft spent two days debriefing Lewis at his home in California.

To read the entire transcript of this story on last night's 60 Minutes program, see Wall Street: Inside the Collapse (Author Tells "60 Minutes" What Led to Wall Street Collapse and Who Predicted It).

To watch the 60 Minutes' program,(1) see:

  • Inside The Collapse, Part 1 (Michael Lewis writes about a handful of Wall Street outsiders who realized the subprime mortgage business was a house of cards and found a way to bet against it),
  • Inside The Collapse, Part 2 (Michael Lewis talks about the current situation on Wall Street, the large bonuses still being paid and his predictions for the future of the industry).

(1) For the real junkies into this kind of stuff, 60 Minutes provides these "web extras" on its website on last night's story:

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