Pushkin.

Hey, it's Nate and Maria.

If we had to guess, we bet a lot of you are familiar with The Big Short, but just in case, it's a best selling book by fellow Pushkin podcast host Michael Lewis, our colleague that they mcame an Oscar winning movie, The Big Short Chronicles of two thousand and eight US stock market crash and the few quirky but brilliant outsiders who saw it coming, bet against the system and cashed out.

A lot has changed since Michael Lewis wrote the book, but some things are as relevant as ever, like what it means to bet against the market and who really pays for an unchecked financial system.

Now, fifteen years after the book came out and ten years after the movie was released, Michael was releasing a new audiobook version of The Big Short and a special companion series on his show Against the Rules, and We've got an episode to share with you today.

In the series, Michael gets into the legacy of the book, the movie, and the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, catching up with the director of the movie, Adam McKay, as well as some of the real life characters depicted by the likes of Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and Jeremy Strong.

Michael also calls up journalists, economists, and historians to make sense of the crisis and how it's still affecting the world today.

In the episode You're About to Hear, Michael is joined by former investment banker and journalist Matt Levine, who talks about bitcoin, bank regulation and new forms of risk taking that have emerged since the crisis.

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

Find the Big Short Companion series on Against the Rules available wherever you get your podcasts, and get the new audiobook version of The Big Short on Audible, Spotify, Pushkin, dot FM, Forward Slash, Big Short Album, Word or wherever you get your audiobooks.

I'm Michael Lewis and.

I'm Ladie Dean Kott.

This is the Big Short Companion podcast on Against the Rules.

In today's episode is all about the financial consequences of the two thousand and eight recession.

Michael, when you said you wanted to do this episode, what consequences were you thinking about?

You know, the things that all kinds of things sort of popped to mind when you look at how Wall Street is now versus how Wall Street was in.

Say, two thousand and seven.

You can see that like the big investment banks Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs are far less prestigious to work for.

They're not getting first cut of the college graduates.

You can see that a whole new set of institutions Jane Street, Citadel, Jump Trading have arisen to take risk that previously we're in the investment banks.

It's like the risk who gets to take the risk has changed and the banks just generally have been removed from the process.

That's like one thing.

Another thing is like Bitcoin is a response, or it seems to have been a response.

The guy who created it, we no one knows who he actually is, but who calls himselves to Toshi made it very clear that it was a response to the mistrust he felt on the back end of the financial crisis.

I just wanted to isolate the financial consequences and talk to someone who knows more about this than I do.

See what we thought.

Matt Levine, Like Matt Levine from the moment he appeared on the scene and started writing his Bloomberg column, I thought, thank god, he's paying attention to this, so I don't have to like, thank God that I can just like I mean, I could come back in and dip into Wall Street every now and then for big narratives, but that I don't have to monitor it in the same way because he basically.

Does it for me.

You can.

I can just read Matt Levine and he's he cares so much more about it than I do.

Like, he cares so much more about the intricacies of finance.

The only time I cared is much about finance as Matt Levine was when I was actually working in it, and then I was engrossed.

But since then, I have a hard time caring.

Sometimes he makes me care about it, but I know he's also like, if it's interesting, he will find it and point it out, and so I can be a little lazy about it.

I'm just going to use his energy to get them across to you.

I'm really excited to hear that conversation.

Matt Levine is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and host of the newsletter and podcast Money Stuff.

His conversation with Michael Lewis is coming right up.

First off, where were you during the financial crisis?

What were you okay?

So, when you say during the financial crisis.

I was on vacation when Lehman filed.

And it's you know, it's such a cliche, but my cousin was getting married in northern California and I was in Napa actually the day that Leman filed, and I woke up and I looked at my phone or my BlackBerry or whatever, and I saw that Lehman had filed, and I was stunned.

And I did the thing that everyone talks about is I went outside to get coffee and everyone was walking around being completely normal, and I had the thought of like, what, like, do you not understand that the world just ended?

Because I was, you know, during the financial crisis.

I was working at Goldman as an investment banker.

So you were at Goldman in a job in investment banking.

All this was going down, and so when it is going down, at any point do you start to think, oh, my I might not have a job.

Of course you did have you did have course, of course, how could you not?

No, it's wild.

I mean there are definitely rounds of like off sudden.

You know, I was pretty fatalistic that, you know, either it'd get laid off or I wouldn't People on my desk got laid off.

I did not get laid off.

Did you at any point think Goldman's not going to survive?

You know, I was not sophisticated enough to have that thought.

Over time, I have come to understand how how leveraged these institutions are and were, and how little of a shove it takes to push investment banks into bankruptcy, and and how close we were in the scheme of things to like Lehman and Bear.

I was on a desk we did like canable bond deals, and we did not do a deal for six or nine months.

We had a master file where you it's like a spreadshee where every time anyone in the market did a deal in our sector, we would like write in the details of the deal, and it was blank.

From I want to say, something like September of two thousand and eight through March or April of two thousand and nine was just blank, like no deals happened in the market.

And so I spent six months doing nothing, and I did not you know, take long lunches or have vacation.

I just sat at my desk and panicked and tried to get deals to happen.

And no deals happened.

Did you get a bonus at the end of O nine?

I must have.

I must have.

Yeah, I did, you know?

I was down a lot from the previous year, but we didn't get here it.

Yeah, did you ever find yourself on the other end of Wall Street hate?

Not like personally, you know, I think that's like Occupy Wall Street occurred around the end of my time at Goldbyn.

I think Kurda a little after I left, and I would go and be interested in it, but like I could see on TV hate for Goldman, but like I never personally experienced it, and I kind of was like, I don't know, there was a sense that it was a little bit cool to be at a place that everyone hated so much.

It's like I felt like, oh, yeah, look at us, everyone hates us.

You know who also feels like that people who work at the irs.

There's an incredible spread of corps because they know everybody hates them and they think what they're doing is virtuous.

But they know everybody hates them, and it somehow brings them together.

I don't want to say that what we were doing was like, you know, virtuous, virtuous, but it was fine.

You know led blank friend says, you're doing God's work.

I want to hear your thoughts about the consequences in the financial industry of the crisis, what came out of it.

That's still with us.

Well.

The thing that I most that I personally experienced the most, that I'm personally most interested in, perhaps is just a shift in who does stuff in the financial industry.

I Mean, when I was at goldban, Goldman was in many ways like the place to be right.

It was the place that sort of generated all the hedge fund managers that like did a lot of the exciting deals.

That was sort of the center of Wall Street.

And after the financial crisis, the power really shifted away from the investment banks for a bunch of reasons, you know, largely regulatory, like largely you know, one, all the big the biggest investment banks like GOLDBN became or were bought by banks, so they became banks, and they regulated as banks.

And two, like you know, they'd almost blown up, and so everyone kind of understood both regulators but also like the banks themselves and the shareholders understood that they couldn't be as levered and as sort of short term funded as they had been in two thousand and seven, and so the banks got much more careful about their balance sheets and they could do fewer trades, but also the regulators kind of prohibited them from doing a lot of the prop trading that was the way that places like Goldban made outsize profits, and also the way they attracted and retained and trained risk takers, and that kind of ended.

And the result is that a lot of the sort of high end action that occurred at the investment banks ended up at what are you know, the big like today are big hedge funds or the big kind of you know, they call them alternative asset managers, like in my day they call them private equity firms.

But like you know, the like Apollos and kkrs and Blackstones got a lot more important because a lot of the kind of like aggressive go anywhere balance sheet financing that the banks used to do, the banks are afraid to do now, and these big institutions with their kind of longer term balance sheets can do that now.

And so like I don't want to say no one wants to work at Goldbin anymore.

I still have a fondness for Goldbvin.

People still want to work at Golbvin.

But it's definitely like the prestige locations on Wall Street have shifted to the big hedge funds, the big asset manager, the big high frequency trading firms.

These are all places that are kind of like closer to the center of the action because they can take more risk.

And the banks took someone's risk in two thousand and eight that they can't do it anymore.

We all decided that these places shouldn't be doing it.

Yeah, because the risk gets socialized if they screw it up.

Yeah, you know, it's it's I've become When I was a banker, I was like, what are you talking about?

Prop trading didn't cause the financial crisis, And as I get older, I become more sympathetic to the regulatory changes.

I think, one, the risk gets socialized if they screw it up.

But then also they're so levered, Like banking is a business model, but also investment banking is as a as it was practiced by the big investment banks in two thousand and seven.

Is such a levered business model where you have like a thin sliver of equity and a lot of very short term you know, deposits or demand funding that can drive overnight and if you get anything wrong, like you vanish and you like leave a crater in the in the market.

When like the private credit firms are doing weird loans that you know, twenty years ago it would have been done by Goldman SSG.

Like those private credit firms have long term financing from like you know, annuities, and they just they're not runnable, like they won't blow up overnight, right, So there's a lot of stuff like that.

They don't have depositors, Yeah, they don't.

Have depositors, And Golbin didn't have depositors in two thousand and seven either, but like they had you know, right, like overnight repo funding and it was a really risky business model, and I think people realize that.

And this is like the story of every financial crisis is like you find a way to get a lot of short term information and sensitive financing against you know, risky stuff that you're up to, and then you blow up.

But I think, like all in all, the system right now it feels less blow up of bleth than it was in two thousand and seven because there is less of that short term financing against like whatever people are up to.

When we come back from the break, Matt Levine and I talk about another consequence of the financial crisis, Bitcoin.

I'm back with Bloomberg opinion columnist Matt Levine.

All right, so the first financial consequences is this kind of mini status revolution on Wall Street where the people who were the top dogs are no longer the top dogs, and because the risks moved out of those firms and into other places, and the status goes to where the risk is being taken.

And that's a status revolution.

It's also like substantively.

You get a better financial model.

I think.

So It's debatable, but I think.

So, yeah, Well would be the other side.

I mean, if you have Apollo and areas in these places who have long term funding against their long term loans, that does seem like a more stable thing than what Goldman was doing or even what City Bank was doing.

The main thing that you hear on the other side is that people call those shadow banks, right, Like, the banks are very carefully supervised, not always successfully, but there's a lot of.

At least somebody's watching them.

There's a regular who's watching the bank and telling them, don't make that loan that's too risky, right, or they ca in theory that's happening with the private credit firms, biking kind of do what they want because they're much more lightly regulated, because they don't have the crazy banking funding model, because they're not too big to fail because they're not you know, their losses aren't socialized.

And then you know, people do worry that leverage is creeping back into the system because it has a habit of doing that, right, private credit firms do get leverage from banks, so like it's kind of circulating back into the banking system.

And you know, when you move away from like private credit, like some of the stuff that banks used to do.

You know, I read about the basis trade, which is you buy treasury bonds and you sell treasury futures and it's a very very very low risk trade because those are almost the same thing, but they're not quite the same thing.

And so people lever that trade up, you know, thirty or one hundred times, And that used to be a thing that banks do, and now it's a thing that like, you know, the Citadels and Millenniums of the world do.

And you know, people definitely look around and say, these things are much more lightly regulated than the old banks where and they're running out a hundred times leverage.

That seems risky, right, Like, and there are occasions where the basis trade kind of blows up, and you know, they're academic saying the FED should have to step in when that happens.

And so it's you know, there's in the long run, you know, you say that, like you socialize the risk when when the banks blow up, But like, I'm not sure that was what people thought in like two thousand and six.

I'm not sure people thought that.

You know, you know, JP Morgan and City Group had deposit insurance and FED access and everything, but like Morgan, Stanley and Goldman and Lehman and Bear were investment banks.

They were kind of more lightly regulated things.

And then it turns out that when they all blow up, the sort of rational thing to do is to socialize the losses, right.

But that was not obviously, It's just what happened, right, And so you could imagine that happening again with you know, if the big hedge funds that had become so central to the financial system find a way to blow themselves up, like, well, those losses get socialized.

Maybe when I asked you what the financial consequence CIZ are the of the crisis, And you said the big when you were focusing on was I didn't think what you were going to say what you did say.

I thought you were going to say bitcoin.

Yeah, I mean bitcoin is is.

It's hard for me to know how how directly bitcoin is a consequence of the financial crisis.

I mean, it's certainly the case that like the Bitcoin white paper references the financial crisis that it seems like the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto was, you know, upset by the leverage in the banking system and by the socialization of losses in the banking system, and wanted a financial system that didn't look like that, that wasn't fractional reserve banking, that wasn't risky, that wasn't based on you know, powerful intermediaries who like got government support, but that was peer to peer and decentralized and safe, right, And I think that resonated with a lot of people.

There's a like countercultural element to crypto and bitcoin where people got into it in part because they didn't trust the banking system.

But I don't want to over state that, because crypto quickly replicated a lot of the elements of the levered, fractional reserve risky financial system as you well know, right.

I mean, like, if you look at the career arc of Sam Bankman, Freed, like no part of what he was doing was a reaction to the risky financial system in traditional finance, right, Like everything he was doing was recreating that system with crypto.

One of the many ironies of crypto is that it seems to be born out of mistrust of institutions and intermediaries, and then it goes and recreates institutions and intermediaries.

It requires even more trust.

Than the thing that it's replacing, because there's like, you know, a thousand people who like are like, oh, I love this thing because it doesn't you know, replaces trust in intermediaries.

And then there's like millions more people are like I like this thing because it went up, right, and then that's like much more you know relevant.

And then so then you have it.

You can build a system around that.

And so if people like it because it goes up, then like offer them leverage, right, offer them you know, trusted intermediary.

And so I think that there is this like like cultural connection between crypto and mistrust in the financial system.

But that is only a very small part of the actual phenomenon of crypto.

The crypto winter that you know, kind of began in the summer before the fall of FTX and under with the fall of FTX, really recreates two thousand and eight, like really like beat for beat is like this is what happens when you overlever something, you know, like it stops going up and so then there's nothing, you know, holding it up because because it's it's super overlevered, and you know, there's no regulation and there's a lot of non transparency about what is backing all of that leverage.

I said to you in the beginning, like I was not sophisticated enough to understand the risk that Golbyn was in when I was at Goldman, Like I witnessed the financial crisis from inside of Golbman, but I didn't like understand it because I was like working my job, you know.

And as I became a financial journalist, I became more of a student of the two thousand and eight crisis.

And it was so useful and interesting to watch the crypto crisis play out because it truly just relearned the lessons of two thousand and eight, and like one thing you learn is that it's all the same thing, right, like a financial crisis, is that they all look the same.

But a difference is that in the crypto crisis that there is no government to come in.

Oh yeah, for a while, there was SAM bankment for it, right, I mean like it was it was truly like people in crypto were like, well, there's no government, there's no FED, but there is.

FTX, right, so there isn't that backstop.

But like but also, you know, the other big difference is that the reason there's that backstop in two thousand and eight is that there is a widespread and I think pretty justified fear that like a collapse of you know, the investment banks, the banking system, like that subsector of the economy could have like real consequences for the real economy because the bank are the lenders that kind of like you know juice economic growth.

Like one day maybe crypto will be that important to the economy.

Of like it wasn't that it's not yet, right, So there's no government bailout because it didn't matter, right, Like all of crypto cold good as zero, and nothing outside of crypto would be affected by that.

You think that's still true now.

I think that is ninety percent true now.

I think that crypto people are working very very hard to change that, right.

I mean, you look at like the integration of stable coins into the traditional financial system.

You look at, you know, the crypto treasury companies, like there's this race to integrate crypto into the real financial system.

Some of that is because the more you integrated into the real financial system, the more it goes up right today, But some of it is like the more you integrated into the real financial system, the better your odds of getting a bailout if something goes wrong.

You could have like a broad view of crypto that's like crypto is finding the sort of last sucker to buy your crypto assets, and like the US taxpayer being the last sucker is like a really good backstop.

That would be sarcasm in case you didn't pick up on it.

When we return, we talk about the lessons we should have learned but didn't from two thousand and eight.

What lessons do you think we should have learned from the financial crisis that maybe we didn't.

I do think that, you know, I have a very conventional view of what happened and what financial crisis are, which is that it's short term information and sensitive leverage on stuff that you think is safe is the dangerous thing.

Right say that I didn't really plain English.

The problem is when you a bank whoever buys off that they think is pretty safe, they buy triple A rated mortgage bonds or whatever, right, and they're like, well, this stuff is really safe, so we can fund it by borrowing overnight against it.

We can like take bank deposits and use it to buy thirty year triple A mortgages because like they're so safe, right.

That is like the source of all financial crises.

Right.

Sometimes it's literally bank deposits, right, Like that's that's what a run on a bank is.

But in two thousand and eight, it's mostly you know, the Goldmans and Lemons and Bears of the world who are not really taking bank deposits, but who are borrowing very short term in capital markets, and they're thinking, well, you know, we have like a big diversified pool of good assets.

We're good traders, so it's pretty safe for us to borrow short term to fund these long term assets.

And then like you lose confidence and that short term funding goes away and you have to sell all your assets and you can't sell them or you can only sell them at deeply discounted prices, and then you go from saying how great you are and how much money you're making to being bankrupt in hours, you know, or days, like it's an extremely fast catastrophe.

So there is there is a distinction to be made in this story between the case where the assets actually are safe and people are misperceiving them as unsafe, and when they're actually not good at all and people are correct to think that they're not worth what you pay for them.

But in the moment, it's very hard for you to you know, or you can't like really satisfy people that everything that you own is good.

But so right, like the lesson to me is very straightforward, which is that runnable you know, short term debt is is the thing that causes financial crisis.

Can people take their money out?

Right?

It's not the asset side, right, And so people worry a lot about risky stuff.

Risky stuff is fine if everyone knows it's risky stuff, right.

What's bad is when you're buying triple a stuff that you think is good that might really be right.

I mean, like what's bad is that you know there's marked and market losses and you have short term funding and you get blown up.

So to me, the thing that like the number one lesson to take away is worry about short term funding.

And I think the regulators definitely took that lesson, and banks are now much more required to have much more capital, they're have much more liquidity, they're much less short term funded.

But the crypto the world didn't learn that lesson, you know, and like there are a lot of other places where, you know, like the reason the original banking crisis was the sort of successor to the financial crisis is that the regional banks are short term funding, right, I mean they had deposits, right.

I think people didn't appreciate, despite how obvious it seems, people didn't appreciate how short term the funding of original bank actually was.

But like nowadays, people are much more worried about the asset side, and they're much more worried about, oh, private credit is is investing in risky stuff, and I think that's like the wrong place to be looking if.

You're looking for the next crisis, Where do you think the right place to look at.

Oh, I don't know.

I don't want to be a crisis longer.

I do think that I want to be clear, I'm not saying this is where the next crisis is, but I do think that the big hedge funds are really interesting, right, the big four, like the multi strategy hedge funds.

They do a lot of the businesses that banks used to do.

They're very levered, and they have this profile of like they're quite safe, right, Like they have a good they have like high sharp ratios.

They're good at, like you know, steadily grinding out profits by doing highly levered trades where they're essentially getting paid to take the other side of the market and to provide liquidity to the market.

They're very well risk managed, they're very smart.

They are the places that train up the best risk takers now in a way that like twenty years ago that was the banks.

Right, So all this stuff, like I'm not saying they're gonna have a crisis to where I'm saying, like that's where a crisis would be.

Right.

They're huge, they're like, you know, they're central to the market, they're highly levered, and all these people, banks, hedgehods, everyone has learned.

You know, they're at Goldvin in two thousand and seven, Like they've learned these lessons, right, but you know, you keep turning the dial a little bit more towards risk and then like there's some chance of things going wrong.

So what else?

Anything else popped in mind?

When I say financial consequences of the crisis Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

I mean that's over.

I don't know like I would put that in the category.

Like that's like a a sort of broad sociological consequence of the of the financial crisis is that the big banks lost status.

Now you can go to Congress and say banks should not be able to charge you know, overdraft fees, and everyone's like, oh yeah, those banks, they suck, right, And so it's easier to regulate banks just generally, right, Like banks have less of ability to get what they want.

I think that is broadly a consequence of the crisis.

When you look at like the CFPB's mandate, I mean, there's nothing to do, there's nothing almost nothing to do with the financial crisis.

There is this nexus of giving people mortgages they can't afford is both a bad consumer banking practice and a you know, contributor to the financial crisis.

Right, That's an important overlap.

But most of the CFPB is doing is like finding banks for doing things that probably improve the stability of the banking system by extracting money from consumers.

Right.

I mean the CFPP is a consequence of the crisis in the sense that people were mad at banks, and so it was a lot more tenable to do things to regulate or punish banks.

But that just sort of ended for political reasons.

So I wanted to pick your brain on just this subject, and I think it sounds like I picked your brain clean, unless there's something else you would like to say.

I'm a little interested in stable clins, and I mean, like stable coins are sort of a way to take risk out of the financial system.

Like instead of having your money at a bank, which could invest it in weird stuff, you have your money in this thing, a stable coin that basically invested in treasurrey bils.

Right.

One thing that I write about a lot is that banking has become narrower.

And what that means is that on the one hand, the institutions that do risky investing are now increasingly funded with like long term locked up equity type funding, so like private credit firms raise equity to make loans, right, rather than using deposits.

And then on the other side, the depository stuff is invested in safer, shorter term stuff and so like classically that's money market funds where like you put money and money market fund they put it in like treasury bills, you get interest, and instead of them lending out your money long term, they're just doing something very safe with it.

And increasingly, like stable coins are becoming that, right, and so like this is like a cryptod incursion into the traditional financial system.

But also people also a lot of people, politicians, crypto people really like it, right, because it does seem like a safer, a more direct way to hold your money than holding on a bank, which might be making you know, buying mortgage decrees with it.

I will tell you who doesn't like it.

My impression is that who doesn't like it as the FED, right, because like the FED likes the traditional banking system, right, they like the ability to transmit monetary policy through bank reserves, right, right, there is this worry that like we're undermining the banking system by moving a lot of what would have been deposits into something else, money market funds and stable coins.

There's an article at Bloomberg about how stable coins are potentially an existential threat to regional banks because like regional banks, they get deposits from like you know, companies depositing your paycheck, and then they use that to like run their business making loans.

And if stable coins become a good payment mechanism and companies are just say I'll give you a stable coin instead of like a direct deposit in your bank account, then like JP Morgan will be fine, Like they'll do a stable coin, It'll be fine, right, But like a lot of regional banks are going to have trouble because the banking system for so long was the sort of sleight of hand of like we take deposits that you think are super safe and we use them to make risky investments.

And if that's going away, then it's an existential crisis for some number of banks.

And is that going away because of two thousand and eight, Like a little bit you can draw that line, right, like the mistrust in the banks and like the understanding that banks take risks with your money like was sort of like you know, brought back to the forefront by the two thousand and eight crisis, and so so some of like the stable coin stuff and the narrower banking stuff really is downstream of that.

I mean, I had never heard the term narrow banking until two thousand and eight, right, Like it became a thing after two thousand and eight, people said, this whole system of you know, we take to we take short term money, and we use it to take risk, make risky bets just became a lot more suspicious.

Can you imagine a world where there are no banks?

People imagine a world where their no banks all the time, I mean not exactly right.

They imagine a world where your deposits.

Live in's stable coins.

Stable coins, in treasury bills in reserves at the Fed right and US dollar you know, digital currency where like you don't have to have a bank, You just your money, like the Fed keeps track of your account for you.

You know.

And then how do you get a mortgage?

Well, you know, like lending Club gives you a mortgage, or like you know, a private credit fram gives you a mortgage, or an insurance company gives you a mortgage.

Or Apollo gives you pollow.

You know.

One thing that Apollo does is they run annuities, right, And an annuity is like we'll give you, you know, a fixed cash flow for thirty years.

Like that's the other side of a mortgage.

Right.

It makes total sense for Apollo to say, we're gonna make mortgages on one side, we're gonna do a new itis on the other side, and they're going to cross perfectly, right.

So it's I think it's pretty easy to imagine a world without banks.

It's just it's very hard to imagine the transition, right, Like, like to go from the world of banks to a world with that banks is going to be really would be really you know, difficult for a lot of people.

But if it happens, and if that's the path we're on, and then narrow banking is just a step on the on the path to no banks.

Uh.

People will tell the story how it all may have kind of just started with a financial crisis.

I think if that happened, I put a very low problem out happening.

But if it happened, yes, I think I think clearly the financial crisis would be the great catalyst because like by the way I mentioned stablekins, like stable coins grat a bitcoin, right, bitcoin grows out of the financial crisis, right, like the sort of like great flourishing of mistrust in the financial system can lead to a lot of consequences, and I think we're, like, you know, partly down the road to those consequences.

That was Bloomberg opinion columnist Matt Levine.

Next week, we're wrapping up this Big Short Companion series by talking with two people whose political careers got their starts with the financial crisis, because the crisis changed more than just finance, It changed politics too.

Against the Rules The Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis.

It's produced by me Luddy, Jin Kott and Catherine Girodeau.

Our editor is Julia Barton.

Our theme was composed by Nick Burtel, and our engineer is Hans Dale.

She special thanks to Nicole opten Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team.

Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.

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