The Big Short hit bookshelves 15 years ago, but the era of securitisation it depicts is far from over — in fact, it’s booming, says Tim Focas

Fifteen years ago this month, Michael Lewis’s The Big Short hit bookshelves, exposing how Wall Street’s reckless financial engineering fuelled the 2008 financial crisis. It was a cautionary tale to be later depicted in a star-studded film — except high finance never listens to the Christian Bales or Brad Pitts of this world. Instead, it adapts.

Securitisation, the process of bundling loans into tradeable assets, was at the heart of the 2008 meltdown. Back then, mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and their Frankenstein-like cousins, collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), imploded under the weight of subprime debt. The ensuing collapse wiped trillions of dollars from markets,........

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