The Big Short discussion

I run a book group withs some pretty bright 14/15 year olds. For years we focused on adventure stories. But, we all agree to branch out. Two events define their youth: 9/11 and the financial crisis. I think it's worth their getting some perspective on at least one of them.

Big Short probably the most entertaining (if incomplete) explanation of how the financial crisis happened. I loved it. So, I'm tempted to go for it. I figure we'll have to have a fair number of discussions about financial instruments and build our own glossary of terms. But, I wonder if there are more challenges and I could just end up with their heads spinning with weird terms.

If anyone has any insights on this, I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

Gary

I think you can teach this to high school kids. Avoid the jargon and the concepts are fairly straightforward. They don't need to know how to build a synthetic CDO. They just need to know that there are ways to create "stock" that allows you to invest in mortgages and if the mortgages are bad, then the stock is bad. They don't need to know how to make a credit default swap. They just need to know that sometimes you can buy "insurance" in case your investments are not good. They are a way of reducing your risks.

They will get most of it. Then you tell them about how banks pushed mortgages on to people who could not afford them mostly because the banks did not care if they were paid back. They didn't care because the mortgages were being used to create the "stock" so people could invest in mortgages.

But everyone got caught up in the popularity of the stock and forgot about the poor quality of the loans.

When a few folks began to wake up to the poor quality of the mortgages, they were able to predict that the stock would crash. But most people -- the supposedly smartest people -- didn't pay attention until it was mostly too late. And the consequences were very grave.

Easy story when taught in small bits sans the financial lingo. I say, go for it.

Hmm, not sure if this is helpful at all, but do you want them to read the book or is it more important to talk about how the financial crisis happened?

If the latter, I agree with what Brad has posted about how you can simplify things, and I think you can even just teach it to them with the jargon and all -- but then this might remove some of the 'suspense' from the book if you want them to read it later. However, by just teaching it, you'd have the chance to explain all the shenanigans in a really straightforward way, unlike the book.

If it's about reading the book, then I think you'd definitely need to prime them on basic terminology and what firms do. If they're up for it, it might be interesting to let them think about how it all happened, and try and figure it out themselves, since there is no nice "summary" of things in the book. Is there a way you can feel out how comfortable they are with finance talk? Or even with non-fiction (assuming you've been dealing with fictional adventure stories so far)?