The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

“There was so much confusion about the different terms,” said Charlie. “In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there’s a reason why it doesn’t quite make sense to us. It’s because it doesn’t quite make sense.”

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen.

It was as if Wall Street had decided to allow everyone to gamble on the punctuality of commercial airlines.

That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.

“All of a sudden I’ve become this caricature,” said Burry. “I’ve always been able to study up on something and ace something really fast. I thought it was all something special about me. Now it’s like, ‘Oh, a lot of Asperger’s people can do that.’ Now I was explained by a disorder.”

“I think these personal foibles of mine were tolerated among many as long as things were going well,” he said. “But when things weren’t going well, they became signs of incompetence or instability on my part—even among employees and business partners.”

One man’s liability had always been another man’s asset, but now more and more of the liabilities could be turned into bits of paper that you could sell to anyone. In short order, the Salomon Brothers trading floor gave birth to small markets in bonds funded by all sorts of strange stuff: credit card receivables, aircraft leases, auto loans, health