The film of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short is a magnificent piece of storytelling that made the 2008 financial crash comprehensible.
In the movie, a renegade hedge fund boss discovers that the financial system contains an unexploded bomb. Huge amounts of poorly secured credit are floating around that are far riskier than the holders realise, or want to admit.
It’s a collective hallucination of trust, and he bets that it must eventually collapse.
