Tag: michael lewis

The Big Con/Scheme/Lie/Rip-Off

Episodes of the old Dragnet radio and TV series had titles with “Big” in them. This one is “The Big Grifter”.

With Sam Bankman-Fried on trial for various charges related to fraud, the timing of Michael Lewis’ latest book couldn’t be better for him or, for that matter, worse. Stopping short of accusing Lewis of Stockholm Syndrome, his reputation is taking a Big Hit for his fawning admiration of Bankman-Fried. As a former Wall Street trader, the author of The Big Short is a successful non-fiction writer, but he isn’t a journalist. If he were, once Lewis was up close and personal with Sam and FTX he would have sensed that “something’s wrong with the whole setup.”

Amazon is offering the Kindle edition of Lewis’ book about Bankman-Fried for less than ten bucks.

Even at that low price I won’t buy Going Infinite. The fact that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair embraced the boy wunderkind’s ambition — and short-lived money — doesn’t make me any more understanding that Lewis fell for Bankman-Fried’s obvious sales pitch. One of the people who saw through Bankman-Fried’s act, perhaps not surprisingly, is an actor who played a crusading comic book character on TV. Ben McKenzie has this review of the Michael Lewis book.

A classic Lewis protagonist—the aberrant thinker, the guy who can hear past the noise—has done it again. This is where things get squirrely in Lewis’ telling.

https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/michael-lewis-going-infinite-sam-bankman-fried-ben-mckenzie-review.html

The Kindle edition of Ben’s book is also less than ten bucks. This is the expose of cryptocurrency and SBF that Lewis’ book should have been.

Who Rules the Rule Makers?

I’m not as liberal as could be assumed from a lot of what I write here. For example, I think the deadly embrace between Corporate America and Organized Labor contributed to the inflation/unemployment spiral of the 1970’s. It also gave us some of the worst cars ever made.

A liberal theme I have expressed often is my distrust of Wall Street. The Federal Reserve and Treasury have served the needs of investment banks very well, but the big firms aren’t satisfied with borrowing money for free. They want unregulated markets, and the only rules of the game they will follow are the ones they write for themselves.

We are still living with the repercussions of the market collapse in 2008, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. In fact, it almost did happen again, as explained in a new documentary, Gaming Wall Street.

The documentary reminded me of a book I read that further explains how the system is rigged, and that markets are free only in the “anything goes” sense. Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis.