Burry discovered that many lending institutions had lowered their standards in order to maintain a high volume of loans, which they sold to financial institutions who "packaged them into bonds and sold them off." (Lewis 32) These bonds ultimately ended up in ordinary people's retirement accounts which suffered greatly when the bond market ultimately collapsed. Burry was one of the first who suspected that the system of sub-prime mortgage bonds was an unstable one and as early as 2005 began to hedge his investments against the market. By the time the sub-prime mortgage bond market collapsed, Burry had set himself up to make a great deal of money. The first two chapters of Lewis book detail the creation of the sub-prime mortgage bond market and how unscrupulous people used these knowingly worthless bonds to make themselves incredibly wealthy as well as one person who recognized the instability of the market and set himself up to...

What is really amazing about these chapters is the pure capitalistic attitude of everyone involved in the financial debacle. Many understood that the system could not be maintained but instead of trying to protect average people and the American economy from an economic disaster, these people simply used a system they knew was wrong in order to enrich themselves. While some made money from creating a flawed system, others did it by manipulating the system when it collapsed and nobody tried to either fix or stop the approaching catastrophe. In the end it was the average American who paid the price for the greed of a few Wall Street financial giants as many were bailed out by the government while ordinary people's retirement accounts suffered.
Works Cited

Lewis, Michael. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York; W.W. Norton,

2010. Print.