The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine, Lewis - B +

                                                I decided to re-read this book because of the recent movie and because day after the I saw the movie, I read a NYT Op-Ed piece that disagreed with the premise of the film, by pointing out that in 2005 and 2006, the housing market was slowing down and there was no recession.  In the opinion of the writer, it took a Fed increase in rates in 2007-2008 to drive the bus off the cliff. I thought that it was interesting  argument nonetheless,  I was skeptical and googled the writer. He is an academic at a think-tank affiliated with James Madison University.  The Board of the entity is led by one of the Koch brothers. Ed Meese is also on the board.  So, one can only conclude that an axe was being ground. I've now added  Op-Ed articles to the lengthening list of stuff I no longer read.  Back to Michael Lewis, who I am reminded here, is one helluva writer.
                                               Steve Eisman (Steve Carelll) in NY and Michael Burry (Christian Bale) in California were two who saw the end coming as debt piled upon debt in the real estate world, and who sought to profit while everyone else optimistically kept lending, creating and selling. Interestingly, both were equity managers who became so surprised at the real estate bubble that they had to investigate the bond market. Burry was first and he approached Wall Street firms seeking to short the sub-prime market. They gladly found a way to do so - credit default swaps. Eisman only entered the market after he was approached by a Deutsche Bank trader,  Greg Lippman (Ryan Gosling), who was selling the swaps in order to create a market from which  he could personally profit. The entity on the other side of the trade in the early years was AIG. Goldman joined Deutsche as the prime market makers.
                                              The absurdity of what was going on can best be summarized in one sentence about Long Beach Savings, a wholly owned sub of Washington Mutual, the largest thrift institution in America.  "In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house of $724,000."  In 2007, the banks making the trades that allowed the skeptics to short the sub-prime mortgage market started to get cold feet. One by one, they began to back off, and slowly the market stopped. Some banks were trying to buy back CDOs  and the shorts began to wonder if they ever would be paid. As skeptics, they began to wonder who on the other side of the trade had the balance sheet to pay-off when things hit the fan. By the end of 2007, the rout of the longs was on. Michael Burry's fund doubled in value over the course of two summer months.  For all intents and purposes, the collapse of Lehman on Sept. 18, 2008 signaled the end of the 'old order'. Wall Street had greedily bet that home prices would go up forever and came close to eviscerating the financial system in the process. Only the intervention of Hank Paulsen and Ben Bernanke, each of whom in one way or another enabled the bubble, saved the Wall Street firms and presumably, the economy
                                                Interestingly, Lewis closes with a discussion of the 1980's as the pre-cursor to the Great Recession. He reminds us that Salomon Brothers was the first investment bank to convert from a partnership to a public company.  When Wall Street's leaders were no longer concerned about their personal liability, it was much easier to pile on the leverage and reap the profits before sowing the whirlwind.

The Killing Kind, Holm - B

                                             This is a novel about hit men, whom I'll identify as H1's, H2 and H3.  The H1's are employees of different US mobs who are killed by H2 (Hendricks), while trying to pursue a hit. H2's motivation is purely financial. He approaches the targets and asks for 10x the price of the hit in order to save them. H3 (Engelman)is hired by the Council (leaders of the various US mobs) to take out H2, because he's messing with their business model. The FBI is in pursuit of Hendricks and discovers the existence of Engelman at a disastrous public event where an H1 is stopped by Hendricks, but only after a great many die.  Hendricks and Engelman  tangle in their climactic armageddon a few days later. All in all, a pretty good read.

Notes From A Small Island, Bryson - C

                                               The incredibly witty Bill Bryson wrote this book twenty years ago. After spending twenty years in the UK, having acquired a wife and family, the American was about to return to the states. Thus, in search for some material, he toured Britain on foot and public transport. Although he is one of the few writers who can make you laugh out loud, I guess I find it too difficult to get too excited about investing the time to read over three hundred pages of stream-of-consciousness ramblings. That said, his description of  what he calls 'Glaswegian' and his attempts to translate are hysterical. The book is impossible to summarize, so I've decided to use this post as a to-do list of places to visit, if I ever get back there and spend time outside of London: the Great Lawn at Cambridge, Salisbury Cathedral,  Lincoln, the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the Lake District, Durham, Edinburgh, and the Yorkshire Dales. He never mentions the one place I've always been fascinated by - Hadrian's Wall.

The End of Tsarist Russia: The March To War and Revolution, Lieven - B +

                                               Dominic Lieven is a noted British historian, whose grandfather, Prince Lieven, Chief of the Russian Naval General Staff, makes a brief appearance here.  In his mid-60's, Lieven states that this, his sixth book on Russia, is his last. He writes that he will present an interpretation of the run-up to the war that is unfamiliar to the Anglophone world and one in which Ukraine is a key consideration.  It is intended to be three books: one about Russia's descent into the war, one an interpretation of the war from Russia's perspective and lastly, an introduction to the Revolution. "A key premise of this book is that World War I was the source and origin of most of the catastrophes that subsequently afflicted twentieth-century Russia. " What followed were revolution, civil war, two famines, collectivization, dictatorship, terror, international instability and a combined death count of fifty million in Russia and the USSR between 1914 and 1945.
                                               The dawn of the twentieth century saw all of the world's great empires, British, American, French, German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian, focused on one thing - preservation and survival.  One part of that process was emphasizing  nationalism at home in order to hold the core in place. However, in the Russian Empire, 19th-century nationalism caused worries in Petersburg, and the stirrings of Ukrainian nationalism were the most feared. Ukraine was historically the home of the Russian church and the place where the state began. It was home to the majority of the Empire's industry and key agricultural foodstuffs. It had its own language and its elites were feeling the stirrings of nationalism.  The future of the empire was further complicated by Nicholas II's foreign policies. "Russia in 1905 provides a classic case of the interaction of imperialism, war, and revolution in a Second World Country.  Petersburg had embarked on an expansionist policy that it could not back with adequate resources. Humiliation in the pursuit of imperial glory led to revolution at home."  The author then spends almost half of the book detailing the incredibly complex foreign policy issues of the Empire in the decade after 1905. Although desperately aware that they needed to avoid war for financial, social, and military reasons, the Russians appear to have stumbled from one  crisis to  another. They feared another power controlling the Bosporus Straits, through which the majority of their exports flowed, but never framed a coherent way to address the issue. They felt they owed the Slavs in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires their support and leadership, but there never was a strategic reason to look after the 'little brothers' other than pride or some sense of ethnic and religious solidarity. The tensions within the AHE between the German and Slavs led to endless tension and crises during the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and the First and Second Balkan Wars. It has always struck me that the era's belief that war was a logical tool in a country's foreign policy arsenal was delusional. That an Empire recently defeated in Asia, with an antiquated military, extensive social unrest, and financial weakness would continue to play the game, is tragic.
                                              As the Austrians had previously concluded that they must defeat the Serbs in order to maintain the Empire and its prestige, Sarajevo provided the catalyst. "Germany's agreement on July 5 and 6 to Austrian action against Serbia was the single most decisive moment in Europe's descent into war."  Fearing a loss of prestige and  influence in the Balkans, the Russians supported Serbia and allowed themselves to slip into war. The author does not care to join any of the recent revisionist sleepwalking theories and lays the blame for the beginning of the war on German support for Austria-Hungary.
                                                 Only thirty pages of this book address the period after August, 1914. Lieven believes that Germany could easily have won the war if it had attacked Russia first. He also states that Hindenburg and Ludendorff made a massive mistake by provoking the US, and essentially lost the war by unleashing unrestricted submarine warfare. Even then, the eastern front handed them an opportunity at Brest-Litovsk to possibly win the war, which the author believes would have happened had they accepted a draw in the west. His last point is that by excluding the two most powerful nations on the continent, Germany and Russia, from Versailles, Europe was made less stable than before the war.  This book provides some different and useful insights. The professional historians who reviewed this book liked it, but do point out that the diplomatic chapters are heavy lifting.