All the Devils Are Here
- Author
- Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
- Published
- 2010
- Pages
- 400
- Recommended
- Once
Why it’s on the list: A history of how the 2008 financial crisis was seeded — and of how lenders, bankers, regulators and politicians mostly believed they were doing something noble while they did it.
Where I saw it: Dan Primack’s Axios column “Dollars and doomers in the AI safety debate” (September 11, 2026). Primack had just finished it and called it “an excellent 2010 book about the seeds of the Great Financial Crisis.” His use of it: very few of the protagonists saw themselves as taking risky or ethically questionable actions, internal doubts were extinguished by not wanting to upset the abundance, and the few public critics were ignored or attacked — a pattern he argues makes a sober conversation about AI risk hard when so much money is at stake.
Connections
- Dan Primack — recommended it as a lens on the AI Safety debate.
- The Big Short — the other canonical narrative of the same crisis, told through the people who bet against it.
- The Smartest Guys in the Room — McLean’s earlier book, on Enron.
- Too Big to Fail and The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis — the crisis from inside Wall Street and the Fed.
- Subprime Lending — the homeownership push the book traces.