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In case you missed it last night, his deconstruction of the subprime mess is well worth watching. Best part is listening to a guy named Michael Burry, who Lewis identified as one of the very few investors who figured out early on what was happening and who made hundreds of millions of dollars betting on an implosion (his new book is called "The Big Short: : Inside the Doomsday Machine"). From CBS News:
"Michael Burry's advantage was he wasn't part of the collective. That he was just this guy in a T-shirt and shorts with a glass eyeball and Asperger's Syndrome, looking at the numbers, and when nobody else really was," Lewis said. "How can they not look at the numbers? I mean, how can Wall Street be buying all of these mortgages and repackaging them, and not realizing that they're not very good mortgages?" Kroft asked. "Wall Street is able to delude itself because it's paid to delude itself. I mean one of the lessons of this story is that people see what they're incentivized to see. If you pay someone not to see the truth, they will not see the truth."
Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted
until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.