“Steve’s fun to take to any Wall Street meeting,” said Vinny. “Because he’ll say ‘explain that to me’ thirty different times. Or ‘could you explain that more, in English?’ Because once you do that, there’s a few things you learn. For a start, you figure out if they even know what they’re talking about. And a lot of times they don’t!”

confess some part of me thought, If only I’d stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created. The characters at the center of Citigroup’s mess were the very same people I’d worked with at Salomon Brothers; a few of them had been in my Salomon Brothers training class. At some point I couldn’t contain myself: I called Meredith Whit

the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.

“We turned off CNBC,” said Danny Moses. “It became very frustrating that they weren’t in touch with reality anymore. If something negative happened, they’d spin it positive. If something positive happened, they’d blow it out of proportion. It alters your mind. You can’t be clouded with shit like that.”

“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor.’”

“There was so much confusion about the different terms,” said Charlie. “In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there’s a reason why it doesn’t quite make sense to us. It’s because it doesn’t quite make sense.”

In the middle was John Paulson. At the top was Steve Eisman.

Howie, inside Morgan Stanley, would lose $9 billion on a single mortgage trade, and remain essentially unknown, without anyone beyond a small circle inside Morgan Stanley ever hearing about what he’d done, or why.

How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.