Pop goes the bubble

This paper examines how financial instruments and processes are popularized in two books: The Big Short by Michael Lewis (2011a) and Dumb Money by Ben Mezrich (2023) . A series of complex concepts mainly related to speculative finance is investigated to see how these bestseller authors make them understandable to wide audiences (i.e., subprime mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps, short selling, short positions, short squeezes, and options). From the data collected through purposive sampling, seven popularization strategies emerge: definition, characterization, reformulation, causality, quantification, metaphor and analogy, and register variation. The analysis shows that causality and quantification appear to be the most frequent. The results are exemplified and discussed within the wider scope of scholarship that engages with financialization, or the growing influence of finance in everyday life. It is suggested that the popularizations conveyed through literary non-fiction books contribute to expanding the popularity of finance in society.