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This commentary is written by Robin Bowerman, Principal, Corporate Affairs & Market Development at Vanguard. The title is Strange tales but true

It was first published on Friday 27 May 2011

And is read by Michael Mullins

Please remember that advice in this podcast represents a general view. It is recommended that you seek specific financial advice, before making investment decisions.

Fact can indeed be stranger than fiction.

Just take the global financial crisis.  There is an increasing range of books, documentaries and films dedicated to revealing what really caused one of the biggest meltdowns in the financial system.

Michael Lewis made himself deeply unpopular with his Wall Street colleagues when he published Liar’s Poker some 20 years ago because it lifted the lid on the  world of a Wall Street bond trader – in particular the world of the junk bond.

But his latest book, The Big Short – inside the Doomsday Machine, provides a compelling and humorous account of the development of the debt products that sowed the seeds for the global financial crisis. The fact that a reasonable time period has now elapsed since the GFC hit also helps.

Lewis, now a mainstream financial journalist in the US, has done a masterful job of putting into context how something as seemingly innocuous as a sub-prime mortgage sold to someone with little capacity to meet the repayments could bring down some of the oldest, established investment banks on Wall Street.

And how a financial engineered product like collateralized debt obligations could sow the seeds for such massive financial losses that governments around the developed world had to step in with unprecedented bailouts to overcome the liquidity crisis and restore confidence in the way our financial system works.

What makes the Big Short interesting is not that it is a forensic, authoritative analysis of what went wrong. Rather it is the way the reader sees the whole build up to the financial crisis through the eyes of a group of often eclectic small-time players that you will have never heard of. Building a sense of suspense into a story that everyone knows the ending to is quite a gift.

There is a sense of moral outrage as the fraud and deception involved is examined – although it is worth remembering that each of these small hedge fund managers were trying to understand how the market was working so they could bet against it – hence the book title - and profit accordingly from the collapse.

If you read only one book on the global financial crisis this ought to be it because apart from some genuine entertainment value it carries a clear, evergreen message for investors.

That is if you do not understand what you are investing in – walk away.

Perhaps the most sobering conclusion out of The Big Short is that even the people closely involved in producing some of these exotic products – much less external third parties like the ratings agencies – did not truly appreciate the risks involved.

What also makes this a timely read is that as the world is on the path to recovery there are signs that some of the lessons of the 2008 crash are already being forgotten.

And that concludes the column

Strange tales but true

from Robin Bowerman, Principal, Corporate Affairs & Market Development at Vanguard Investments Australia

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Please remember that advice in this podcast represents a general view. It is recommended that you seek specific financial advice, before making investment decisions.