OK, but this is nothing new for Michael Lewis. Don't get me wrong, he is a brilliant writer and I've enjoyed every one of his books that I have read, even "Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to the White House". He is also a very entertaining speaker, if you get the chance to hear him.
But he writes fiction. It is very very very important to understand this. Consider The Big Short, in which he imagined Michael Burry as a contrarian lone genius, fighting Wall Street madness single-handed against impossible odds. The reality is very different. About 2/3 of the mortgage-backed CDOs contributing to the crisis were synthetic, meaning that the assets they were built on weren't actual mortgages, they were "side bets" as protrayed in the movie version. And what was deeply stupid about the movie version was that Michael Burry was the guy making the side bet! For every dollar of credit risk sold to an investor, there was a dollar of credit insurance purchased by a Michael Burry via CDS. Far from being a lone genius, Burry was a boson, one of a horde of indistinguishable particles of identical characteristics, without whom the crisis would have been impossible. That is to say, Lewis presents the underlying facts of the matter just about completely backwards.
We have recently seen that his good friend Sean Tuohy was maybe not everything that Lewis cracked him up to be, and perhaps that even represented a conflict of interest. I personally think he also got the good guys and bad guys wrong in Flash Boys, but let's not get too deep into the weeds. You get the point. Read Lewis for pleasure, not for information.
I'm 2/3 the way through Lewis's book on SBF and find all the sturm and drang about his approach to the subject laughable. Lewis had unprecedented access to SBF and others working for both Alameda and FTX that nobody else writing on the topic had. Lewis fairly discusses the problematic issues which now are well known. Crypto has always been a fantasy investment where a small number of people make money at the expense of a great many others. Alameda and FTX operated without suitable institutional controls and certainly a lack of accounting. Ultimately the legal system will decide the fate of SBF and there will be other books, podcasts, essays, and a movie or two on the subject (along with a lot of psychological analyses of the leading characters :-) ).
As with Mr. Koop, I've also read all of Lewis's books and enjoyed all of them. Some of them cover matters that I know quite a bit about and I found those well thought out and factual. The bottom line for me is any single book on a topic is insufficient and one needs to read a variety of perspectives.
OK, but this is nothing new for Michael Lewis. Don't get me wrong, he is a brilliant writer and I've enjoyed every one of his books that I have read, even "Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to the White House". He is also a very entertaining speaker, if you get the chance to hear him.
But he writes fiction. It is very very very important to understand this. Consider The Big Short, in which he imagined Michael Burry as a contrarian lone genius, fighting Wall Street madness single-handed against impossible odds. The reality is very different. About 2/3 of the mortgage-backed CDOs contributing to the crisis were synthetic, meaning that the assets they were built on weren't actual mortgages, they were "side bets" as protrayed in the movie version. And what was deeply stupid about the movie version was that Michael Burry was the guy making the side bet! For every dollar of credit risk sold to an investor, there was a dollar of credit insurance purchased by a Michael Burry via CDS. Far from being a lone genius, Burry was a boson, one of a horde of indistinguishable particles of identical characteristics, without whom the crisis would have been impossible. That is to say, Lewis presents the underlying facts of the matter just about completely backwards.
We have recently seen that his good friend Sean Tuohy was maybe not everything that Lewis cracked him up to be, and perhaps that even represented a conflict of interest. I personally think he also got the good guys and bad guys wrong in Flash Boys, but let's not get too deep into the weeds. You get the point. Read Lewis for pleasure, not for information.
Touché...
I'm 2/3 the way through Lewis's book on SBF and find all the sturm and drang about his approach to the subject laughable. Lewis had unprecedented access to SBF and others working for both Alameda and FTX that nobody else writing on the topic had. Lewis fairly discusses the problematic issues which now are well known. Crypto has always been a fantasy investment where a small number of people make money at the expense of a great many others. Alameda and FTX operated without suitable institutional controls and certainly a lack of accounting. Ultimately the legal system will decide the fate of SBF and there will be other books, podcasts, essays, and a movie or two on the subject (along with a lot of psychological analyses of the leading characters :-) ).
As with Mr. Koop, I've also read all of Lewis's books and enjoyed all of them. Some of them cover matters that I know quite a bit about and I found those well thought out and factual. The bottom line for me is any single book on a topic is insufficient and one needs to read a variety of perspectives.