The 2008 collapse told through the handful of people who saw it coming and bet against the mortgage market, which is the only way to make the instruments legible.
The achievement is explaining a synthetic CDO without the reader noticing they are being taught. It works because the characters do not understand it either at first, and their confusion carries yours.
The part that stayed with me is how long they were wrong before they were right, and how close being right came to destroying them anyway.
Read June 2016.