When we first began Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, I was quite apprehensive while reading it as I had no clue about what was happening with all of this business/finance talk. I found myself referring to Google searches or Investopedia trying to identify certain terms to help me understand things a little bit better such as a credit default swap, but it was still difficult to follow along as the material was heavy on the business side of things. I feel as though this was Lewis’ intention, emphasizing the idea that people had no idea what was happening unless you were a banker yourself. While I enjoyed the language (mostly metaphors) that Lewis uses in discussing the events leading up to the housing crisis, I couldn’t help but feel as though the story was incomplete or missing something from it allowing me to feel connected with the work and feel fully satisfied with the story. While we saw what led up to innocent people being hurt by the housing bubble burst, we didn’t really get to see how they were affected and if they recovered from it. Yes, there is some mention toward the end of the book in how the people on Wall Street knew this would broadly affect the average American, but we didn’t get to see beyond that. We did not get to see a more human aspect to it, which as a result added to my sense of disconnect from The Big Short.
Directly after reading The Big Short, we jumped into Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, a novel that turns its attention toward an American family that would be affected by the actions of the investors. To some level after reading both The Big Short and The Turner House, I would say that they work well together to tell somewhat of a complete story and nearly complete Freytag’s Pyramid that we have discussed in class in explaining the housing market crash. Each work tells one half of a version of the story (The Big Short telling the first half and The Turner House telling the second) that nearly completes Freytag’s Pyramid where there is a rising action, a climax, and a falling action, except in this case there does not seem to be any real resolution to complete the pyramid, therefore showing the 2008 housing and financial crisis does not really follow the complete storyline structure we are accustomed to.
Continue reading “The Incomplete Story of the 2008 Housing Crisis”