Michael Lewis's 'The Big Short' Gets Up Close And Personal With Perpetrators Of Financial Catastrophe

"Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai started Cornwall Capital Management in a shed behind a friend's house in Berkeley, California, in 2003. A natural contrarian, Ledley believed, writes Lewis, that "the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening." But what made Ledley and Mai especially good at what they did was their tenacious research. It did not take them long to decide that they had to invest against the latest and, by sheer volume, the greatest rage of the age, Wall Street's mortgage bonds. Securitization had gone much too far."