Society and Class Quotes in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

Vinny and Danny flew down to Miami, where they wandered around empty neighborhoods built with subprime loans, and saw with their own eyes how bad things were. (4.78)

The dudes at FrontPoint spend a lot of time thinking about the subprime market, but even they are unprepared for the reality on the ground. It's one thing to look at a bunch of numbers in an online database and try to make sense of them, but it's a whole different ballgame when you see how those silly little digits have destroyed entire neighborhoods.

Quote #5

The more they examined the individual bonds, [...] they came to see [...] the new taste for lending huge sums of money to poor immigrants, for example. (4.41)

Now this is just evil. Many immigrants have high credit scores because of their new status in the country, even if they're working low-paying jobs. This, along with a lack of experience with the American banking system, leads many of them to be manipulated by the banks into taking awful home loans.

Quote #6

To the right were the targets: a photograph of [...] a young black kid attacking a pretty white woman, an Asian hoodlum waving a pistol. (6.21)

This is from Charlie Ledley's gun shop outing with the Bear Stearns bond traders, and we think it's a pretty apt metaphor for how the subprime mortgage market affects working class Americans. The Wall Street bros use them for target practice alongside pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.