Michael Lewis’ The Big Short reminds us how Wall Street mobilized government to save themselves from the financial crash.

By David Frum:

All around us we see the losers and victims of the crash of 2008: the foreclosed homeowners, the unemployed managers making a substitute office out of a Starbucks table. It was Michael Lewis’ brilliant idea to study winners: investors who shorted the housing market when the shorting was good. He made a brilliant book out of his idea too, as you likely don’t need me to tell you: The Big Short perched for many weeks atop the bestseller lists, and deservedly so.

The book is everything you’d expect from Lewis: vivid, funny, smart and ironic. His characters are fascinating oddballs: three recent college graduates betting their own dollars and pleading with Wall Street banks to disregard their unimpressive sublet premises atop Julian Schnabel’s studio in Greenwich Village; a hedge fund manager who dropped out of medical school because he discovered he didn’t actually care about helping people; a stock picker so disgusted by what he learns of the subprime mortgage market that he ends up a supporter of ACORN and other radical causes.

But here’s the thing you might not expect. At the end of his book, the winners have won tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet they don’t feel like winners. The years of being on the receiving end of Wall Street’s scorn and disregard were not smoothed by their moment of triumph – in part because in every case, the major institutions they bet against were able to mobilize government to save themselves, even reward themselves.

Read More: http://www.frumforum.com/how-wall-street-got-off-the-hook