The Big Short

I just finished listening to The Big Short, which was pretty good. It was odd not to hear the least mention of the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in the mania to issue loans that no one seriously expected to  be repaid.  It also was odd, in all the discussion of the confusion of guys going short who wondered "who are the crazy people who are taking the long side of this bet?"--never hearing any mention of the appetite of Fannie Mae et al. in buying up the junk mortgages.  Possibly they had a smaller role than I had gathered.  In every other ways, it's a very informative discussion of how structured finance worked and how deliberately opaque all the terms were.  There is a more comprehensible explanation of how badly the rating agencies dropped the ball, and the consequences of their dereliction, than I've seen before.