Credit crisis: the thriller

This is off-topic as far as our industry, but it clearly does affect our industry.

If you ever want to know what exactly happened in the years leading up to the credit crisis, this is a must-read. Written by a former wall street guy, Michael Lewis, who got out of the game in his mid-20s back in 1988 to save his sanity, predicting the crisis, this 9 page article reads like the script for a thriller.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

Read the mind-boggling rest of it here. I can’t wait for this to be made into a movie.

Found on lowetion’s twitter-feed. Thanks!!