The Big Short
non-fiction work by Michael Lewis
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis about the build-up of the United States housing bubble during the 2000s. It was released on March 15, 2010, by W. W. Norton & Company. It spent 28 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and was the basis for the 2015 film of the same name.
Summary
The Big Short describes several of the main players in the creation of the credit default swap market who sought to bet against the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) bubble and thus ended up profiting from the 2008 financial crisis. It also highlights the eccentric natures of people who bet against the market or otherwise "go against the grain."
The book follows people who believed the housing bubble was going to burst—including Meredith Whitney, who predicted the demise of Citigroup and Bear Stearns; Steve Eisman, an outspoken hedge fund manager; Greg Lippmann, a Deutsche Bank trader; Eugene Xu, a quantitative analyst who created the first CDO market by matching buyers and sellers; the founders of Cornwall Capital, who started a hedge fund in their garage with $110,000 and built it into $120 million when the market crashed; and Michael Burry, an ex-neurologist who created Scion Capital.
It also highlights some of the people involved in the biggest losses in the market crash: Wing Chau, Merrill's $300 million mezzanine CDO manager; Howie Hubler, known as the person who lost $9 billion in one trade, the fifth-largest single loss in history; and Joseph Cassano's AIG Financial Products, which suffered more than $99 billion in losses.
Reception
The Big Short was shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. It spent 28 weeks on The New York Times' non-fiction bestseller list. It also received the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award.
Film
Paramount acquired the rights to The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine in 2013.
The public source identifies “The Big Short” as non-fiction work by Michael Lewis. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Short, non-fiction and work.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4091844. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2015, 2008 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Big Short” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.