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Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, talks about financial reform efforts and Goldman Sachs.

Michael Lewis gives an account of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. His latest book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, is an insider’s view of the people behind the financial collapse—the villains, a few heroes, and those who look very foolish: high government officials, ...

"Disappointed" was the word that Mary Schapiro, Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission, used to describe the performance of the SEC. Schapiro promised to do better at providing the oversight that taxpayers and ordinary investors expect. She appeared before Congress to talk about new funding slated for the regulatory body. Author Michael Lewis, who chronicled the excesses of Wall Street in his book "Liar's Poker", talks to The Takeaway about the SEC.

WE LANDED AT Charles de Gaulle Airport a couple of days before Christmas. One dog, one infant, nine books on how to get along with the French, and eleven pieces of luggage, three of which had already gone missing. We drove for ninety minutes in heavy traffic, the baby howling, the wife attempting to hide her exposed nursing bosom from the driver, and the dog scratching her bottom across the floor of the minivan. At length we arrived at our new home on the Left Bank, which we’d never actually seen, except in photographs. It was a small cluster of room-sized houses in a tiny garden tucked away at the back of a courtyard of an old apartment building. We piled out of the car and rushed to the front door, a small teeming peristaltic bundle of needs and hopes and anticipations. The door failed to open. The key mailed to us by the landlord did not fit the lock.

For the next thirty minutes, we sat in the cold, dark Paris courtyard and waited, mainly because we couldn’t think what else to do. We were being punished for our sins; we had wanted to dance, now we were paying the fiddler. It had been fun, when people asked us where we lived, to say, "Well, that’s hard to say, since at the end of the year we’re moving to Paris." They were all envious, or pretended to be, which was just as gratifying. For the past six months we had been playing our new role: People Who Are About to Live in Paris. Now here we were, in Paris itself. We knew no one. We spoke so little French that it was better to claim we spoke none. We had no purpose. And that, I should have reminded myself, was the point. ... (more)

Not many parents would publicly admit that they thought about throwing their sleep-deprivation-inducing newborn off a balcony. But writer Michael Lewis decided that it was important to tell the ugly truth about the development of parental love. In his book "Home Game," he talks about learning to be a father to his three children. Lewis talks to The Takeaway about the joys and travails of being a dad.
Read an excerpt from his book, Home Game.

Michael Lewis has three children. When each was born he found that he was expected to feel things he didn’t feel and do things he couldn’t see the point of doing. In Home Game: An Accidential Guide to Fatherhood he humorously chronicles his reckoning with becoming a parent.