And it severely understates what has been done to make sure the crisis doesn’t happen again. It ultimately misstates the relative importance of stupidity versus fraud in creating the crisis. It actually overstates the complexity of the crisis. But as well-acted and well-crafted as the film version may be, it has three basic explanatory problems. To disclose my crisis bias, I helped former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with his memoir Michael Lewis, the best-selling author who wrote the book that inspired The Big Short, wrote a lovely review. Neither did regular CDO’s, short for collateralized debt obligations, even though celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain deserves consideration for that explanatory Oscar after popping up to compare them to three-day-old seafood stew.

But synthetic CDO’s didn’t create the crisis either, any more than Gomez’s microphone creates hit records.

The right-wing notion that Big Government created the crisis is absurdly ahistorical. They’re wrong: it is appropriately brutal to Wall Street and the financial sector. Some conservatives have argued that The Big Short is unfairly brutal to Wall Street and the financial sector. It was instructive to see McKay discuss his views on the collapse and its aftermath in an interview with Vox, because despite his ambitious vision for his film, he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. Its angry take on the financial crisis is misleading and its furious take on financial reform is wrong. But The Big Short is not necessarily, with more apologies to Gomez, good for you, unless you happen to be Bernie Sanders. I get why so many critics have given it, as Gomez might say, that same old love. Why was everyone groaning? A bet is a two-way deal, so shouldn’t the winners of those side bets be cheering? And anyway, why would a bunch of random side bets among consenting adults nuke the economy? Finally, if the dealer is supposed to represent Wall Street, because the house always wins, why did Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and so many other Wall Street behemoths lose so badly that their firms collapsed in 2008? But since many Americans will be inclined to believe The Big Short’s cinematic version of the mortgage crisis, it’s worth noting that its analysis of what actually happened to the American economy-even down to the virtuosic little explainer asides-doesn't really add up. Oscar-nominated director Adam McKay deserves credit for trying to make such complex financial concepts accessible. That’s not a bad introduction to the synthetic CDO, the derivative the movie’s narrator describes as the “atomic bomb” that nuked the global economy.

The big short book