I thought it might be. I'd be curious to hear a more balanced perspective on the crisis, and I suspect part of that will come as I just inform myself about the industry as a whole.

Thanks for the recommendation - I will be buying Hedgehogging this week if I can't find it at the library.

There are a lot of books on the subject and I've read quite a few of them.

Like most things, different perspectives led different people to arrive at different conclusions about what led to the crisis.

Put very simply, the folks in charge (traders) were simply allowed to take on too much risk. And by risk, I mean that they were allowed to borrow money to make bets on the future value of securities. They believed that most of that risk was offloaded to a company that could absorb it (AIG) but it turns out that they couldn't. When everyone found out that AIG couldn't absorb that risk (defaults on mortgage-backed securities), they ran for the hills (refused to lend money with mortgage-backed securities as collateral).

Hedgehogging will give you a good idea of the people/mentality that drives traders and how managing big money works. It's a complicated business and quite different from your regular mom-and-pop investor. One of the lessons I took from the book was that being very successful in your fund can lead people to WITHDRAW their money from your account. It's like they expect you to be unable to repeat your performance.

Another lesson is that a lot of hedge funds fail. Their fund manager can't get out of a slump and everyone takes their money out. The fund closes.

But the best lesson is the analogy of fund managers to star athletes. Those managers that can consistently beat the market are paid very well because they are making a lot of other people very very rich. That's rare and not a lot of people can manage it.