The Apocryphal Twain: “Things we know that just ain’t so.”

Adam McKay’s Oscar-winning film The Big Short opens with the above epigraph. Seems appropriate enough, for a cautionary tale about financial bubbles inflated by mass delusion. The film, like the Michael Lewis book upon which it is based, focuses with sometimes queasy admiration on the handful of financiers who bet against the conventional wisdom of the Greenspan era: that U.S. housing prices would rise in perpetuity. The epigraph describes what, in […]