The Big Short

Sheryl Sandberg COO/FacebookMichael Lewis's ability to boil down the most complicated subjects is like a magic trick. You can't believe your own eyes. He takes on important issues - from the 2008 Wall Street crash in "The Big Short" to parenting in "Home Game" - and breaks them down to the deepest truths. His combination of an extraordinarily analytical mind and a deep understanding of human nature allows him to weave together data and events to offer a fresh and insightful narrative. Whatever the topic, the result is always compelling and even thrilling. I am in awe of him. (Source)

Tim Harford If I had any criticism of the book, it’s that he makes it seem too obvious. It becomes mysterious how anyone could have been confused. (Source)

Francis Fukuyama What Michael Lewis points out very forcefully is that they were deliberately created by Wall Street banks in order to produce non-transparent securities that could not be adequately evaluated by the rating agencies, which then could be sold to less sophisticated investors, who would buy the idea that this junk debt actually had triple A ratings. So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis. (Source)

John Kay It tells us the difficulty markets have in correcting group think. You really have to be quite Aspergerish to take a stand against the crowd. In fact one of Lewis’s heroes, as it were, is hedge fund manager Michael Burry, who clearly had serious socialisation problems. (Source)

Barry Ritholtz Michael Lewis, to me, is the preeminent narrator of the financial crisis. He is the guy who constructs the story better than anybody else. (Source)

Fabrice Grinda I have lots of books to recommend, but they are not related to my career path. The only one that is remotely related is Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That said here are books I would recommend. (Source)

David Heinemeier Hansson A good one. (Source)

David J Lynch This is a great book. There has been so much written about China over the years and this is a wonderful read. A lightly fictionalised tale of this guy Tim Clissold and his adventures as a businessman and investor back in the early 90s when China was just starting to open up and western businessmen were salivating at the prospect of selling into China and this is a very warts-and-all perspective on the problems that westerners run into. The British textile industry used to say that if each Chinaman would just lengthen his shirt by an inch the mills in Lancashire would be running indefinitely.... (Source)