No one saw it coming. In April 2005, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan spoke glowingly of the burgeoning subprime mortgage industry. At his Senate confirmation hearings a few months later, current Chairman Ben Bernanke similarly disavowed any danger of a housing bubble. Policymakers, financiers, and captains of industry have spoken in near-unanimous chorus: no one saw it coming. Michael Lewis's The Big Short is the story of some of those who not only anticipated the collapse but made a fortune betting on it. Clearer and more comprehensive accounts of the tumult have been written, but none delivers with such force its human particulars.
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Nathan Barczi is an economist, and an elder at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and son.
Issue: "Sola Scriptura" Nov./Dec. 2010 Vol. 19 No. 6 Page number(s): 54-55
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