The story of the housing mortgage collapse of 2008. Lewis follows the people and processes that created the subprime mortgage programs and their uncontrolled growth. When this led to loan insurance bond portfolios amongst the financiers, and wild paper trading of billions of dollars, the few people who truly understood the process predicted the collapse to occur in 2007-2008. At the predicted time, millions of recent homebuyers were unable to meet the level of contracted increased interest rates on their loans and were forced to foreclose. The few financial investors who predicted this made a fortune as major national banks went bankrupt or were given bailouts by the government. The author writes so a layperson can follow the progression of the whole catastrophe.
