Name: Summer Reading Assigned By My Boss, pt. 2
Item: All the devils are here
Author: captain_____morgan

All the devils are here →

by Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera

Summer Reading Assigned By My Boss, pt. 2

captain_____morgan

Oct 10, 2024

You have to marvel at the level of detail presented here. Cobbled together by two authors and presumably an army of unsung research assistants, this book untangles the details of the 2008 financial crisis. As a reader, it washed over me in a mind-numbing spray of interest rates and acronyms. You ultimately lose the forest for the trees.

Compared to “The Big Short” or even an average episode of HBO’s “Industry,” this doorstop fails to illustrate the significance of the events it chronicles. Yes, this is set up as a tick-tock procedural demonstrating the “how” stretching back decades, but the authors simultaneously present too much detail for the average reader and oversimplify matters for the egghead quant.

I was mostly fascinated by the formula they developed to introduce characters. It’s a solution to a problem: How do you introduce a sprawling cast from across dozens of regulators and financial institutions? The answer here is to set them up, virtually without fail, using the same paragraph. You get a sentence or two about their appearance (some variation of “their bald head glittered under the lights of a Senate hearing…”) and another sentence or two about their upbringing and educational background. Then it's back to credit default swaps.

I know that these lame “character studies” are designed to differentiate names and build a narrative — I’ve had editors insert them into my own wiring. But the sheer number of introductions following the same formula feels counterproductive, reducing people to constellations of interchangeable datapoints. Even worse is how this book leans on these random pieces of trivia to simplify huge, complex threads of the story. I don't think one sentence about a guy's Division III baseball career explains much about why Countrywide Financial flambéed our country's housing market.

In the end, there is a damning story at the center. But the workmanlike approach — a hallmark of a book rushed to publication by a desire to be “first” — makes it hard to get through. A comprehensive account of these events would unfortunately need to be much longer and written with the benefit of additional hindsight (this was published in 2010). In roughly 400 pages, ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE accomplishes as much as one really good Wikipedia article.