Inside Job

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (Norton, $15.95, 291 pages)

“The problem wasn’t that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail.   The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed.”

If you read The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, and think this is going to be another warm and fuzzy story, think again.   This is a former insider’s telling of the reasons the American economy was virtually destroyed by greed in the early 2000’s and it will get you angry – or at least it should.   Here’s one example pointed out in the book…

It’s late 2006 and U.S. home values have just suffered their greatest decline in 35 years.   And, so, Goldman Sachs selected this time to give a bonus to each and every one of its employees – a little bonus of $542,000 (not salary, but some extra spending cash for the holidays)…   How does this make you feel?

If you’re a normal human being without any ties – familial or otherwise – to Wall Street, you should be infuriated by the knowledge of these practices; and there are dozens of examples provided by Lewis.   Yes, this is a tale of incredible hubris.  Lewis, who had once worked at Solomon Brothers, notes that Wall Street traders saw themselves as geniuses who were above reproach:  “(They had) the ability to see themselves in their successes and their management in their failures.”   In fact, however, Lewis well makes the case that these same self-proclaimed geniuses simply didn’t grasp the details of the game that they were playing.   And we all paid the price for their failures.

In just a few years, “One trillion dollars in (subprime-related) losses had been created by American financiers…”   Lewis is honest enough to say that if he’d remained on the Street, he might have been part of the problem:  “If only I’d struck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.”

“This woman (Meredith Whitney) wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt.   She was saying that they were stupid.”

This is also the story of one Dr. Michael Burry, a man who figured out that big money could be made off of the Street’s losses and ignorance – he decided to bet, big-time, against subprime mortgage tranches and won big-time.   Burry was a man who figured out early on (in 2007) that Wall Street’s rating firms were engaging in massive cheating – rating as solid risks mortgage packages that were pure losers.   One single pool of “crappy mortgages” (falsely rated) – based on home loans made between April and July of 2005 – was allegedly worth three-quarters of a trillion dollars, but the entire pool was basically worthless.

The problem with Lewis’ account, which he states began as a policy paper on the roots of the modern-day American fiscal crisis, is that it reads like a dry white paper.   There’s no sense of outrage, no moral center.   Even while Lewis complains that the U.S. government (and, specifically, the White House) transformed Wall Street firms into public corporations, which were then deemed to be “too big to fail,” there’s no sense of anger.   Thus, we’re left with a sense of amorality, instead of immorality, in this presentation.

This is an interesting and easily read account, but it’s quite frustrating and not recommended.   If you want to enjoy something written by Michael Lewis, try The Blind Side.

Joseph Arellano

This book was purchased by the reviewer.  

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Coming Up Next…

A review of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side.

Looking back

The real message of The Catcher in the Rye – A Teacher’s Perspective

Like all of us who read The Catcher in the Rye, and like many of us who teach the novel, I was saddened by the death of J.D. Salinger.   But I also have been saddened by the eulogies about this most well-known unknown author.

What’s especially sad – from this teacher’s perspective – is that most folks seem to have missed the point of the novel.   Of course Catcher is about a troubled teen trying to work his way through adolescence in a world peopled by phonies.   And, yes, the broader context of Holden Caulfield’s story – the isolated, elite world of private schools in Cold War America – is important.

But all of that is landscape, and none of it helps us to understand the story’s central question:  Why is he so messed up?   And in the same way that nearly everyone around Holden reacts to the manifestations of his troubles – the smoking, drinking and swearing – and not the reason he behaves as he does, for years my students have fixated on his bad habits.   And then I ask them:  Why is this kid who has money, two parents, a successful older brother and a sister who adores him in such a bad place?   Eventually we get to Allie, Holden’s younger brother, who died of leukemia.

Throughout the story, Holden tells us it’s all about Allie, how the grief he had for his beloved sibling led to his broken hand, how he carries Allie’s mitt for comfort and how he prays to Allie to save him.   For me, that is the thread that links all of Holden’s good and bad choices together, that is the layer we must reach to really understand this story, and that is what we adults can look to in order to really recognize the weight and beauty of Salinger’s book.

Holden is meaningful today because, even though he is white and privileged, like too many children he is hurting and invisible.   His absent parents send him off to boarding school, his older brother is away pursuing his career, his teachers sort of try to help the poor guy, and his peers are too screwed up themselves to save their pal.   Only his sister Phoebe understands Holden and, to borrow the cliché of my students, is “there for him.”   Holden tells her of his plan to run away, and unlike everyone else, who advise him to consider the consequences of his actions (so teacher-like), Phoebe’s response is to pack her suitcase and go with him.

She knows what no one else knows – that to rescue someone, you don’t hand them a pamphlet, you take their hand.  

In the movies “Precious” and “The Blind Side,” we see perfect examples of how this works:  Suffering young people are saved when those with Phoebe-like sensibilities intervene.   It’s the only way.

So here’s this teacher’s take-home message:  We all need to be Phoebe and look out for those around us, our friends and family and especially all the children everywhere.   We all need to be that “catcher in the rye.”

I hope I got that right, Mr. Salinger.

This essay was written by Gene Kahane, an English teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda (in northern California).   Reprinted with his permission.