Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

Obama was enthusiastic. The crisis had laid bare the vulnerability of financial consumers, some of whom had shared their experiences with him on the campaign trail or in the letters he read at night. However, he didn’t need their testimony. He had his own. When I gave the president a copy of The Big Short, Michael Lewis’s riveting book about how mortgage scams had led to the financial crisis, Obama thumbed through it with a knowing smile. “I lived this story,” he said. “I remember very well. Because of our student loans, Michelle and I could never catch up. So, some months, we paid our bills with credit cards. I went to refinance our condo and I was kind of surprised when they said, ‘You can get cash, too.’ So all of a sudden, my condo is worth fifty thousand dollars more and I can take forty thousand dollars in cash as a loan? I did it, but it seemed too good to be true. It was a racket.”