The big short by Michael Lewis: Stanley hires youthful inspiration
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Opinion

The big short by Michael Lewis: Stanley hires youthful inspiration

Michael Lewis has been promoting his latest blockbuster, The big short, a non-fictional yarn about the sub-prime crisis and meltdown on Wall Street.

 

According to Lewis one of his main inspirations when he began researching the book was a 22-year-old Harvard undergraduate named AK Barnett-Hart, who was writing what would become an award-winning thesis entitled The story of the CDO market meltdown: an empirical analysis. Lewis says Barnett-Hart’s work was more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject.

Euromoney understands that the former violin prodigy from Boulder, Colorado, is now employed by Morgan Stanley as an analyst. It just goes to show just how far Morgan Stanley has come since the crisis took it to the brink of collapse. As Lewis’s book tells us, a Morgan Stanley trader by the name of Howie Hubler was responsible for the biggest single loss from an individual trader during the sub-prime crisis: $9.4 billion.

We were unable to ascertain whether Barnett-Hart works on the investment bank’s mortgage or CDO desk, or if James Gorman had a personal hand in hiring her. One thing is for sure though: he might have trouble keeping her now.

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