In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis celebrated the brave few who, prior to the crash of 2008, refused to swallow the Kool-Aid being ladled up from Wall Street’s sterling silver punchbowl. “The best way to make money on Wall Street,” one of these mavericks dared to think, “was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.”
Of course, in 2008, some mavericks turned out to be right. But as influential as The Big Short has been in shaping popular perceptions of the crash, it is misleading.
Not false. But misleading. There are always mavericks convinced that their judgement is superior to that of the market, but very few are profiled by Michael Lewis because the rest learn the hard way that they are wrong: putting your...
Dan Gardner is a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen and author of Risk: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger (McClelland and Stewart, 2008) and Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail— and Why We Believe Them Anyway (McClelland and Stewart, 2010).
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