The Big Short

If you are looking for an amusing, easy to read account about the massive bets surrounding the sub-prime mortgage market, I strongly recommend Michael Lewis' The Big Short. What's so good about his writing is that he gets inside the characters of the players involved: the quirky fund managers hanging on to their conviction that everything will go horribly wrong; the clueless bankers driven by the prospect of big bonuses as long as they can continue to churn out CDOs in massive volumes; and, worst of all, the terrible ratings agencies who sanctioned the bonds as being perfectly palatable without investigating their toxic elements. Michael Lewis is a master at engaging his reader. I remember reading The New New Thing on a plane to San Francisco, but that's another story.