The author of 'The Big Short' just viciously slammed The Wall Street Journal
From the interview:
'The Wall Street Journal is a much worse newspaper than it was 20 years ago,' he asserts, taking aim at the bible of US high finance. 'The news side of the paper has the fingerprints of the finance industry all over it'.
Lewis' book was turned into a smash hit feature film about the financial crisis at the end of 2015. It's the story of a number of off-beat investors who saw the mortgage crisis coming, and made a fortune shorting it.
Since writing the book, which was published in 2010, Lewis has been vocal about his belief that the government did not go far enough in punishing Wall Street for its excess and ensuring that the industry will not be ask reckless in the future.
This Spectator interview, though, is the first time we've heard him this critical of financial journalists.
"We are underserved by critical, knowledge-able financial journalists who don't have any fear whatsoever of what their subjects think of them," he said
"Why were The Big Short and Flash Boys [Lewis' 2014 book about high frequency trading] available to me to be written?...These stories should have been gobbled up by newspaper and magazine journalists."
It is worth pointing out that The Wall Street Journal's Scott Patterson published a book on high-frequency trading in 2013 titled Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market.
Michael Lewis said the book was "an excellent history of the early electronic traders," according to the Amazon page for Dark Pools.
We've reached out to The Wall Street Journal for comment and will update this when we hear back.
Read the full interview here>>