The Big Short: Read the Book/Watch the Film

A concordance summary of the book chapters and the film scenes (DVD Blueray cut) for use in university classrooms and elsewhere.Dr. Sase discovered that the book and film The Big Short provides a great springboard for classroom discussions. Michael Lewis has written many books about real people and real events in the financial markets. In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton. 2011), Lewis does a commendable job of explaining exactly what happened in these markets between 2004 and 2008-events that drove old, established companies such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers out of business while millions of Americans lost their homes in the largest mortgage meltdown in history. In 2015, Paramount Pictures released The Big Short, the film adaptation directed by Adam McKay. The movie tells a story of idiocy and greed in modern-day finance as a compelling drama with a stellar cast that includes Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, and others. McKay relates this complex story in a fast-paced and even humorous manner that lets the narrator (Greg Lippman, played by Ryan Gosling) break the fourth wall and bring the audience along for a wild ride. As a lecturer on Money, Banking, and Financial Markets at Wayne State University and as a former Outside Director (public watchdog) of $3.5 billion of index funds at Comerica Bank throughout the 1990s, I (Dr. Sase) thought that I would put together a concordance of the book and film. As I formed this concordance from the book, the shooting script, and the final cut of the film, something clicked inside as I discovered a fresh, viable way to explain complicated matters and events in Economics, Finance, and Law to a wide audience. In this treatment of the story, I offer you an escorted walk through the ten chapters of the book and the 130 minutes of screen time. I want you to kick back and enjoy a splendid book and film production that incorporate the major themes of greed, stupidity, and human emotion that have been a mainstay of storytelling since the days that we sat around a fire for mutual protection against saber-tooth tigers, wooly mammoths, and other beasties.