Michael Lewis: The End

This is a really long article, but it's an interesting study on the sub-prime collapse (there is some harsh language):

I called Whitney again and asked her, as I was asking others, whom she knew who had anticipated the cataclysm and set themselves up to make a fortune from it. There’s a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.

John T. Reed’s Real Estate B.S. Artist Detection Checklist

I thought this guide by John T. Reed was funny and informative.

1. Emphasis on luxurious lifestyle...
6. Emphasis on motivational material...
35. Citing professed religiousness as a selling point. “Trust me because I say I’m religious,” is an age-old con man’s ploy. Whether a real-estate guru adheres to the teachings of any religion is irrelevant, not to mention unverifiable. Use of professed religiousness as a selling point is improper. There is an old saying something to the effect that, “When a man starts telling me how religious he is, I check to see if I still have my wallet.”

More Jim Rogers

Here is an article from about a year ago (before the big crash) that includes some of Jim Roger's views at the time.

Rogers, who is short Fannie Mae shares, is also short Citigroup (C, news, msgs) and highly negative on its prospects, too.

"Technically, it's bankrupt, with gigantic off-balance-sheet derivatives positions whose value it cannot possibly know," he says. Though he believes some large banks can and will go under in the next year or two under the weight of billions of dollars worth of bad loans and blown-up derivatives positions, he doubts the government will allow Citi or Fannie to fail. "They'll nationalize them in some way. It's wrong, but they can't let the two largest lenders in the nation go down."