The End of Wall Street

“That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice,” he says. “They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.”

Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker, which described the financial problems going on in the 1980's, returns to talk about what went wrong this time. Here are the gory details of the sub-prime market and the story of one hedge fund manager who saw it all coming, shorted the whole mess, and told everyone what was going to happen as loudly as he could. No one was listening, and his own shorts helped fuel the ever-more-self-destructive system.

Via Austin Bunn