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March 24, 2010 at 08:00 PM
I’ll be visiting my Borders Saturday (this is written Friday, March 19) and will look for Michael Lewis’s new book. He was interviewed on 60 Minutes on the March 14, and I heard him on NPR Monday (I think it was Monday). He wrote Liar’s Poker and, of course, The Blind Side.
From what I heard, his thesis about The Great Debacle* is that pretty much no one in the investment biz really knew what was going on; that greed got the better of Wall Street; and that Goldman may have actually been the reason that AIG needed a bailout, since the former apparently induced the latter to consider selling credit default swaps, or insurance policies minus the insurance word (and, thus, also minus regulation).
The interviews with Lewis alone are enough to make one wonder about the wizards of Wall Street, who may not be so wizardly at all. In the book, there are apparently some real wizards, who are decidedly not on Wall Street, including a doctor with a glass eye and Asperger’s Syndrome.
