Michael Lewis Collection

Michael Lewis's account of his years as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, combined with a history of how Lewis Ranieri's mortgage department turned home loans into a bond market. It is the funniest book about Wall Street and still the best introduction to trading-floor culture and to how a dominant firm can lose its way.

Michael Lewis edits an anthology of journalism written while five modern financial crises were unfolding, from the 1987 crash and the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management to the dot-com bust and subprime. Reading what smart observers said at the time is a useful corrective to hindsight, and shows how often the same mistakes come back.

Michael Lewis tells the subprime crisis through the handful of outsiders who saw it coming and bet against it: Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, the young founders of Cornwall Capital and Deutsche Bank's Greg Lippmann. Funny and precise, it is the best single explanation of how mortgage bonds, CDOs and credit default swaps turned bad loans into a global crash.

Michael Lewis follows RBC trader Brad Katsuyama as he works out why the prices on his screen vanish the moment he tries to trade, and traces the answer to high-frequency traders who profit from being microseconds faster. It is the book that put market structure, dark pools and the founding of IEX in front of a general audience.

Michael Lewis spent the 2002 season inside the Oakland A's front office as Billy Beane, with a payroll about a third of the Yankees', used statistics to buy wins the market underpriced. It is a baseball story, but it is really about market inefficiency: how an entire industry misprices assets when it trusts appearances and tradition over evidence.

Michael Lewis's follow-up to Liar's Poker collects about 30 short magazine and newspaper pieces on the late-1980s boom, from leveraged buyouts and Donald Trump to Japanese investors and teenage futures traders in Paris. It is a witty, uneven field report on the decade that made modern finance, written just after the party ended.

Michael Lewis follows the cheap credit of 2002 to 2008 from Wall Street to Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany, then back home to California's broke cities. It is a short, funny and pointed account of how sovereign and municipal debt crises grew out of the same bubble that produced The Big Short, and of how national character shaped each country's losses.

Michael Lewis spent about a year shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried before and after FTX collapsed in November 2022, and this is his portrait of the Jane Street trader turned crypto billionaire. It is a close-up study of a strange mind and a firm with almost no controls, and the most debated book of Lewis's career for how much benefit of the doubt it gives its subject.

Michael Lewis tells the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli psychologists whose work on heuristics, biases and prospect theory showed that human judgment fails in predictable ways. It is a book about friendship and its unraveling, and it also explains where behavioral finance and much of Moneyball's logic came from.

Michael Lewis looks at what the federal government actually manages, from the nuclear arsenal to weather data to farm loans, and what happened when the 2016 Trump transition ignored it. For anyone who prices risk, it is a lesson in how the dull, unglamorous risk of bad project management can matter more than the dramatic ones.

Michael Lewis tells the story of the Covid-19 response through a handful of doctors and scientists who saw the pandemic coming and tried to act while the CDC and the White House stalled. It is not a finance book, but it is Lewis's familiar study of outsiders who read the data correctly and institutions that would not listen, applied to the largest tail risk of the decade.