Tom & Alissa

Michael Lewis says that even in this financial mess (to use a much weaker word than I’d like), we can look on the bright side. Sort of.

A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.

Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker, a startlingly engaging and scary story about the birth of mortgage-backed securities (otherwise known as, the Legalized Gambling That Is Screwing Wall Street And Everyone Else Over Right Now) in the 80’s. When I started training before beginning my job at Banc of America Securities in June of 2005, our instructor insisted that we read Liar’s Poker before we start work, and it was fascinating but really and truly frightening. I sat reading it and feeling like our whole financial system was just a house of cards waiting for a little puff of air. And what do you know? Two years later.