The Big Short

If you only read one book this year, make sure to read Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short. Here are some of the people who are also reading it and recommending it. Let's hope some of them get the crap scared out of them. (Thanks to Politico)

In the midst of a floor speech on regulatory reform, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) interrupted himself for a sort of commercial announcement.

“I’m going to plug a book: Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short.’”

While debating changes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) told his colleagues: “Read this new book, ‘The Big Short.’”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was decrying Republican obstructionism on the floor when he said, “I recommend everyone within the sound of my voice to read the book.”

Politicians have been known to latch onto books — Amity Shlaes’s “The Forgotten Man” was a must-read among Republicans last year during the bailouts — but few works have shaped a legislative debate quite like Lewis’s story about investors who made a killing by betting on the housing crash.

For a lot of Democrats — and even some Republicans — the book has created a kind of defining counternarrative of the economic collapse.

And it’s given Lewis rock star status among some on Capitol Hill.

In the fall, Lewis met with House Republicans to discuss the financial crisis.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) invited Lewis to speak to the House Democratic Caucus in May. Afterward, a brigade of senator fans, including Democrats Carl Levin of Michigan and Kay Hagan of North Carolina, approached him to say they liked the book.

“I was just in shock,” Lewis said. “They came up to say ‘Hi,’ and they read the book and liked it and mentioned it on the floor, that kind of thing.”

Back home in Berkeley, Calif., Lewis started getting calls from Hill staffers who wanted his insights on the financial meltdown and the best way to prevent another one.

“I tell them all the same thing: ‘I’m not Jesus, I’m Brian’” — a reference to the Monty Python character who repeatedly finds himself mistaken for the son of God.

Lewis may not be the Messiah, but lawmakers are treating his book as though it were the Bible.

“The Big Short” tells the story of the economic meltdown through the eyes of a handful of investors who were smart enough to see the subprime mortgage crisis coming — and greedy enough to cash in on it.

As lawmakers navigate the mind-numbing terrain of credit default swaps and interest-only, negative-amortizing, adjustable subprime mortgages, Lewis’s book gives them a straightforward way to think and talk about it all.

“The Big Short” has been mentioned at least 15 times on the Senate floor and in press conferences and committee hearings. At a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government in April, Durbin told Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro, “I’ve joined a lot of other people in just finishing Michael Lewis’s book, ‘The Big Short,’ and it’s really an eye-opener of what was going on at the time that this real estate bubble was created.”

Republican Sens. John Ensign of Nevada and Kit Bond of Missouri have name-dropped the book. And Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) is fond of dropping catchphrases from it — such as “thin files” and “barbelling” — during committee hearings.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37987.html#ixzz0pcLZJGcE