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The bonds and CDOs sold for far more than they were worth because they’d been wrongly issued sterling grades from the agencies. These instruments had been wildly overrated by the credit ratings agencies, whose job it was to evaluate the riskiness of the securities. By simply doing the research and analysis that no one else was willing to do, this group (working largely independently from one another) saw that the CDOs were nothing more than repackaged bundles of mortgages issued to un-creditworthy Americans. The group-Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, Greg Lippmann, Charlie Ledley, Jamie Mai, and Ben Hockett-discovered that subprime mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were essentially worthless. Major financial institutions had deeply overvalued these securities and had passed them off to investors throughout the financial system. They saw, simply by reading financial statements and exercising basic due diligence in their investment decisions, that Wall Street was caught up in a cycle of irrational exuberance regarding mortgage-backed securities. These investors were lifelong iconoclasts who refused to worship at the altar of high finance. Ryan Gosling’s character, Jared Vennett, is based on real-life bond trader Greg Lippmann. Michael Burry, Ben Hockett (Ben Rickert in the film), Steve Eisman (Mark Baum in the film), Charlie Ledley, and Jamie Mai (Jamie Shipley in the film) are the real-life investors the movie is based on.
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housing market-and, by extension, the entire financial system-was built on a foundation of sand. The Big Short explores the origins of and fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis through the eyes of a handful of eccentric and oddball investors who saw that the U.S. Do you know the real story behind the movie? The movie The Big Short, starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt, among others, is based on the 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading. This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis.