Books of The Times - Michael Lewis’s ‘Big Short’ - Investors Foresaw Meltdown - Review - NYTimes.com

Books of The Times - Michael Lewis’s ‘Big Short’ - Investors Foresaw Meltdown - Review - NYTimes.com: "To begin with, there’s Steve Eisman, who had started out “a strident Republican” and was on his way “to becoming the financial market’s first socialist” as he grew increasingly convinced that “an entire industry, called consumer finance,” basically “existed to rip people off.” Mr. Eisman and his team “had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street,” Mr. Lewis writes, and by performing the sort of nitty-gritty credit analysis on mortgages (that should have been done before the loans were made in the first place), they realized that they could make a fortune by shorting the worst of the worst."