Graydon Carter in Vanity Fair calls Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine “the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game… essential reading.” But Danny Schechter, author of the Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, begs to differ. At Media Channel, he writes:

Lewis has criticized those who criticize Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg, writing earlier, “Bashing Goldman Sachs is Simply a Game for Fools.”Which side is he on? I would guess, his side? On 60 Minutes, TV’s top newsmagazine, he was described as a former trader. Not according to Janet Takakoli who runs her own financial firm: “Imagine my surprise to see him billed as a trader on 60 Minutes, since he was actually a junior salesman,” she writes on Huffington Post, “Well-heeled male peacocks strutted the trading floor, and junior salesmen were girlie-men, mere eunuchs serving their pashas.”

She also notes that he was among the “experts” who downplayed the warnings about the very financial crisis that he has suddenly, thanks to validation from CBS and MSNBC, become THE expert on, charging, “he ridiculed their concern of a pending crisis due to the surge in derivatives demand and called it “this year’s case in point.” Then Michael showed how dangerous it is to be a brilliant writer with a poor command of facts and their true meaning.”

And:

Lewis, like many non-fiction novelists, prefers character-based story telling or “yarns” to more objective analytical investigation. The reason: it makes for better narratives, and bigger best sellers. It also gets interviewers laughing instead of crying. Why? Because there are only smart men doing things that turn out to be stupid, it makes us all feel superior to them even if they had the last laugh on the way to the bank. If no one is to blame, then everyone is to blame, etc..Sorry, “The Big Short” seems short—short of a serious consideration of what really drove the financial crisis and the reason that 82% of the American people recently said they want a crack down on Wall Street, not a chance to feel sorry for the “delusions” of its masters of the universe. They want a jail out—not a bailout.

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