Review: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s a how-to book, but not the best kind. To accomplish what the businessmen (and occasionally mentioned businesswomen) created, you really had to be in the right place and at the right time. The right place was in a mortgage bank or financial firm, and the right time was the decade or so leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. This is the book on the building of that crisis. The focus is the building blocks of derivative contracts based on mortgages, passing off more and more risk in financial instruments as non-risky investments. The crisis deepens through the first ¾ of the book, with the last quarter of the book describing the subsequent crash and the immediate impacts of the rapid unwinding of those derivatives. I’ve read other books on the financial crisis that seemed more “back end heavy” in terms of focusing on the crisis and the response. This is more on the build-up.

And what a story it is. The moral seems to be “do your homework, especially if your assumptions have never been tested”. Well written, engaging, with plenty of anecdotes about powerful (mostly) men with over-sized personalities, and often egos.


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