The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine Part 1

The Big Short.

INSIDE THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE.

by Michael Lewis.

PROLOGUE.

Poltergeist.

The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day. I was twenty-four years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. Wall Street's essential function was to allocate capital: to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue. I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as totally preposterous--which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later would come a Great Reckoning, when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds, if not thousands, of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money or persuading other people to make those bets, would be expelled from finance. pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day. I was twenty-four years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. Wall Street's essential function was to allocate capital: to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue. I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as totally preposterous--which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later would come a Great Reckoning, when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds, if not thousands, of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money or persuading other people to make those bets, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience--Liar's Poker, it was called--it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message and stuffing it into a bottle for those who pa.s.sed through these parts in the far distant future. Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it had happened.

Up to that point, just about everything written about Wall Street had been about the stock market. The stock market had been, from the very beginning, where most of Wall Street lived. My book was mainly about the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts. This, too, I a.s.sumed was unsustainable. I thought that I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America, when a great nation lost its financial mind. I expected readers of the future would be appalled that, back in 1986, the CEO of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million million as he ran the business into the ground. I expected them to gape in wonder at the story of Howie Rubin, the Salomon mortgage bond trader, who had moved to Merrill Lynch and promptly lost $250 million. I expected them to be shocked that, once upon a time on Wall Street, the CEOs had only the vaguest idea of the complicated risks their bond traders were running. as he ran the business into the ground. I expected them to gape in wonder at the story of Howie Rubin, the Salomon mortgage bond trader, who had moved to Merrill Lynch and promptly lost $250 million. I expected them to be shocked that, once upon a time on Wall Street, the CEOs had only the vaguest idea of the complicated risks their bond traders were running.

And that's pretty much how I imagined it; what I never imagined is that the future reader might look back on any of this, or on my own peculiar experience, and say, "How quaint." How innocent. innocent. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last for two full decades longer, or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary economic life would swell to a difference in kind. That a single bond trader might be paid $47 million a year and feel cheated. That the mortgage bond market invented on the Salomon Brothers trading floor, which seemed like such a good idea at the time, would lead to the most purely Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last for two full decades longer, or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary economic life would swell to a difference in kind. That a single bond trader might be paid $47 million a year and feel cheated. That the mortgage bond market invented on the Salomon Brothers trading floor, which seemed like such a good idea at the time, would lead to the most purely financial financial economic disaster in history. That exactly twenty years after Howie Rubin became a scandalous household name for losing $250 million, another mortgage bond trader named Howie, inside Morgan Stanley, would lose $9 economic disaster in history. That exactly twenty years after Howie Rubin became a scandalous household name for losing $250 million, another mortgage bond trader named Howie, inside Morgan Stanley, would lose $9 billion billion on a single mortgage trade, and remain essentially unknown, without anyone beyond a small circle inside Morgan Stanley ever hearing about what he'd done, or why. on a single mortgage trade, and remain essentially unknown, without anyone beyond a small circle inside Morgan Stanley ever hearing about what he'd done, or why.

When I sat down to write my first book, I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale. If you'd gotten a few drinks in me and then asked what effect the book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to decide what to do with their lives might read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up, and abandon their pa.s.sions or even their faint interests, to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Goldman Sachs, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message was mainly lost. Six months after Liar's Poker Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State University who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual. was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State University who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting. There was no scandal or reversal, I a.s.sumed, sufficiently great to sink the system.

Then came Meredith Whitney, with news. Whitney was an obscure a.n.a.lyst of financial firms for an obscure financial firm, Oppenheimer and Co., who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It's never entirely clear on any given day what causes what inside the stock market, but it was pretty clear that, on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of, and who could have been dismissed as a n.o.body, had shaved 8 percent off the shares of Citigroup and $390 billion off the value of the U.S. stock market. Four days later, Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince resigned. Two weeks later, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

From that moment, Meredith Whitney became E. F. Hutton: When she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear: If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a cold, hard look at these c.r.a.ppy a.s.sets they're holding with borrowed money, and imagine what they'd fetch in a fire sale. The vast a.s.semblages of highly paid people inside them were worth, in her view, nothing. All through 2008, she followed the bankers' and brokers' claims that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with her own claim: You're wrong. You're still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business. You're still not acknowledging billions of dollars in losses on subprime mortgage bonds. The value of your securities is as illusory as the value of your people. You're wrong. You're still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business. You're still not acknowledging billions of dollars in losses on subprime mortgage bonds. The value of your securities is as illusory as the value of your people. Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it's true that she was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what was going to happen to these Wall Street firms, or even the extent of their losses in the subprime mortgage market. The CEOs themselves didn't know. "Either that or they are all liars," she said, "but I a.s.sume they really just don't know." Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it's true that she was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what was going to happen to these Wall Street firms, or even the extent of their losses in the subprime mortgage market. The CEOs themselves didn't know. "Either that or they are all liars," she said, "but I a.s.sume they really just don't know."

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She'd just expressed most clearly and most loudly a view that turned out to be far more seditious to the social order than, say, the many campaigns by various New York attorneys general against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created. If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created. The characters at the center of Citigroup's mess were the very same people I'd worked with at Salomon Brothers; a few of them had been in my Salomon Brothers training cla.s.s. At some point I couldn't contain myself: I called Meredith Whitney. This was back in March 2008, just before the failure of Bear Stearns, when the outcome still hung in the balance. I thought, If she's right, this really could be the moment when the financial world gets put back into the box from which it escaped in the early 1980s. I was curious to see if she made sense, but also to know where this young woman who was cras.h.i.+ng the stock market with her every utterance had come from. The characters at the center of Citigroup's mess were the very same people I'd worked with at Salomon Brothers; a few of them had been in my Salomon Brothers training cla.s.s. At some point I couldn't contain myself: I called Meredith Whitney. This was back in March 2008, just before the failure of Bear Stearns, when the outcome still hung in the balance. I thought, If she's right, this really could be the moment when the financial world gets put back into the box from which it escaped in the early 1980s. I was curious to see if she made sense, but also to know where this young woman who was cras.h.i.+ng the stock market with her every utterance had come from.

She'd arrived on Wall Street in 1994, out of the Brown University Department of English. "I got to New York and I didn't even know research existed," she says. She'd wound up landing a job at Oppenheimer and Co. and then had the most incredible piece of luck: to be trained by a man who helped her to establish not merely a career but a worldview. His name, she said, was Steve Eisman. "After I made the Citi call," she said, "one of the best things that happened was when Steve called and told me how proud he was of me." Having never heard of Steve Eisman, I didn't think anything of this.

But then I read the news that a little-known New York hedge fund manager named John Paulson had made $20 billion or so for his investors and nearly $4 billion for himself. This was more money than anyone had ever made so quickly on Wall Street. Moreover, he had done it by betting against the very subprime mortgage bonds now sinking Citigroup and every other big Wall Street investment bank. Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino. Yet John Paulson had been a Wall Street customer. Here was the mirror image of the same incompetence Meredith Whitney was making her name pointing out. The casino had misjudged, badly, the odds of its own game, and at least one person had noticed. I called Whitney again to ask her, as I was asking others, if she knew anyone who had antic.i.p.ated the subprime mortgage cataclysm, thus setting himself up in advance to make a fortune from it. Who else had noticed, before the casino caught on, that the roulette wheel had become predictable? Who else inside the black box of modern finance had grasped the flaws of its machinery?

It was then late 2008. By then there was a long and growing list of pundits who claimed they predicted the catastrophe, but a far shorter list 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 ma.s.s hysteria--to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded--without being insane. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it, mainly investors she had personally advised. In the middle was John Paulson. At the top was Steve Eisman.

CHAPTER ONE.

A Secret Origin Story.

Eisman entered finance about the time I exited it. He'd grown up in New York City, gone to yes.h.i.+va schools, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania magna c.u.m laude, and then with honors from Harvard Law School. In 1991 he was a thirty-year-old corporate lawyer wondering why he ever thought he'd enjoy being a lawyer. "I hated it," he says. "I hated being a lawyer. My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. They managed to finagle me a job. It's not pretty but that's what happened." grown up in New York City, gone to yes.h.i.+va schools, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania magna c.u.m laude, and then with honors from Harvard Law School. In 1991 he was a thirty-year-old corporate lawyer wondering why he ever thought he'd enjoy being a lawyer. "I hated it," he says. "I hated being a lawyer. My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. They managed to finagle me a job. It's not pretty but that's what happened."

Oppenheimer was among the last of the old-fas.h.i.+oned Wall Street partners.h.i.+ps and survived on the sc.r.a.ps left behind by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. It felt less like a corporation than a family business. Lillian and Elliot Eisman had been giving financial advice to individual investors on behalf of Oppenheimer since the early 1960s. (Lillian had created their brokerage business inside of Oppenheimer, and Elliot, who had started out as a criminal attorney, had joined her after being spooked once too often by midlevel Mafia clients.) Beloved and respected by colleagues and clients alike, they could hire whomever they pleased. Before rescuing their son from his legal career they'd installed his old nanny on the Oppenheimer trading floor. On his way to reporting to his mother and father, Eisman pa.s.sed the woman who had once changed his diapers. Oppenheimer had a nepotism rule, however; if Lillian and Elliot wanted to hire their son, they had to pay his salary for the first year, while others determined if he was worth paying at all.

Eisman's parents, old-fas.h.i.+oned value investors at heart, had always told him that the best way to learn about Wall Street was to work as an equity a.n.a.lyst. He started in equity a.n.a.lysis, working for the people who shaped public opinion about public companies. Oppenheimer employed twenty-five or so a.n.a.lysts, most of whose a.n.a.lysis went ignored by the rest of Wall Street. "The only way to get paid as an a.n.a.lyst at Oppenheimer was being right and making enough noise about it that people noticed it," says Alice Schroeder, who covered insurance companies for Oppenheimer, moved to Morgan Stanley, and eventually wound up being Warren Buffett's official biographer. She added, "There was a counterculture element to Oppenheimer. The people at the big firms were all being paid to be consensus." Eisman turned out to have a special talent for making noise and breaking with consensus opinion. He started as a junior equity a.n.a.lyst, a helpmate, not expected to offer his own opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than a year into the new job. A subprime mortgage lender called Aames Financial went public, and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer's bankers, who hoped to be hired by Aames, stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about the mortgage business. "I'm a junior a.n.a.lyst and I'm just trying to figure out which end is up," says Eisman, "but I told him that as a lawyer I'd worked on a deal for The Money Store." He was promptly appointed the lead a.n.a.lyst for Aames Financial. "What I didn't tell him was that my job had been to proofread the doc.u.ments and that I hadn't understood a word of the f.u.c.king things."

Aames Financial, like The Money Store, belonged to a new category of firms extending loans to cash-strapped Americans, known euphemistically as "specialty finance." The category did not include Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan but did include many little-known companies involved one way or another in the early 1990s boom in subprime mortgage lending. Aames was the first subprime mortgage lender to go public. The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility was called Lomas Financial Corp. Lomas had just emerged from bankruptcy. "I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of s.h.i.+t. I didn't know that you weren't supposed to put sell ratings on companies. I thought there were three boxes--buy, hold, sell--and you could pick the one you thought you should." He was pressured to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat did not come naturally to Steve Eisman. He could fake upbeat, and sometimes did, but he was happier not bothering. "I could hear him shouting into his phone from down the hall," says a former colleague. "Joyfully engaged in bas.h.i.+ng the stocks of the companies he covered. Whatever he's thinking, it comes out of his mouth." Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the Lomas Financial Corporation announced that investors needn't worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. "The single greatest line I ever wrote as an a.n.a.lyst," says Eisman, "was after Lomas said they were hedged." He recited the line from memory: "'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial inst.i.tution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote." A few months after he published that line, the Lomas Financial Corporation returned to bankruptcy.

Eisman quickly established himself as one of the few a.n.a.lysts at Oppenheimer whose opinions might stir the markets. "It was like going back to school for me," he said. "I would learn about an industry and I would go and write a paper about it." Wall Street people came to view him as a genuine character. He dressed half-fastidiously, as if someone had gone to great trouble to buy him nice new clothes but not told him exactly how they should be worn. His short-cropped blond hair looked as if he had cut it himself. The focal point of his soft, expressive, not unkind face was his mouth, mainly because it was usually at least half open, even while he ate. It was as if he feared that he might not be able to express whatever thought had just flitted through his mind quickly enough before the next one came, and so kept the channel perpetually clear. His other features all arranged themselves, almost dutifully, around the incipient thought. It was the opposite of a poker face.

In his dealings with the outside world, a pattern emerged. The growing number of people who worked for Steve Eisman loved him, or were at least amused by him, and appreciated his willingness and ability to part with both his money and his knowledge. "He's a born teacher," says one woman who worked for him. "And he's fiercely protective of women." He identified with the little guy and the underdog without ever exactly being one himself. Important men who might have expected from Eisman some sign of deference or respect, on the other hand, often came away from encounters with him shocked and outraged. "A lot of people don't get Steve," Meredith Whitney had told me, "but the people who get him love him." One of the people who didn't get Steve was the head of a large U.S. brokerage firm, who listened to Eisman explain in front of several dozen investors at lunch why he, the brokerage firm head, didn't understand his own business, then watched him leave in the middle of the lunch and never return. ("I had to go to the bathroom," says Eisman. "I don't know why I never went back.") After the lunch, the guy had announced he'd never again agree to enter any room with Steve Eisman in it. The president of a large j.a.panese real estate firm was another. He'd sent Eisman his company's financial statements and then followed, with an interpreter, to solicit Eisman's investment. "You don't even own stock in your company," said Eisman, after the typically elaborate j.a.panese businessman introductions. The interpreter conferred with the CEO.

"In j.a.pan it is not customary for management to own stock," he said at length.

Eisman noted that the guy's financial statements didn't actually disclose any of the really important details about the guy's company; but, rather than simply say that, he lifted the statement in the air, as if disposing of a t.u.r.d. "This...this is toilet paper," he said. "Translate that."

"The j.a.panese guy takes off his gla.s.ses," recalled a witness to the strange encounter. "His lips are quavering. World War Three is about to break out. 'Toy-lay paper? Toy-lay paper?'"

A hedge fund manager who counted Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it--after he'd described Eisman exposing various bigwigs as either liars or idiots--and started to laugh. "He's sort of a p.r.i.c.k in a way, but he's smart and honest and fearless."

"Even on Wall Street people think he's rude and obnoxious and aggressive," says Eisman's wife, Valerie Feigen, who worked at J.P. Morgan before quitting to open the women's clothing store Edit New York, and to raise their children. "He has no interest in manners. Believe me, I've tried and I've tried and I've tried." After she'd brought him home for the first time, her mother had said, "Well, we can't use him but we can definitely auction him off at UJA."* Eisman had what amounted to a talent for offending people. "He's not tactically rude," his wife explains. "He's sincerely rude. He knows everyone thinks of him as a character but he doesn't think of himself that way. Steven lives inside his head." Eisman had what amounted to a talent for offending people. "He's not tactically rude," his wife explains. "He's sincerely rude. He knows everyone thinks of him as a character but he doesn't think of himself that way. Steven lives inside his head."

When asked about the pattern of upset he leaves in his wake, Eisman simply looks puzzled, even a bit wounded. "I forget myself sometimes," he says with a shrug.

Here was the first of many theories about Eisman: He was simply so much more interested in whatever was rattling around his brain than he was in whoever happened to be standing in front of him that the one overwhelmed the other. This theory struck others who knew Eisman well as incomplete. His mother, Lillian, offered a second theory. "Steven actually has two personalities," she said carefully. One was that of the boy to whom she had given the brand-new bicycle he so desperately craved, only to have him pedal it into Central Park, lend it to a kid he'd never met, and watch it vanish into the distance. The other was that of the young man who set out to study the Talmud, not because he had the slightest interest in G.o.d but because he was curious about its internal contradictions. His mother had been appointed chairman of the Board of Jewish Education in New York City, and Eisman was combing the Talmud for inconsistencies. "Who else studies Talmud so that they can find the mistakes?" asks his mother. Later, after Eisman became seriously rich and had to think about how to give money away, he landed on an organization called Footsteps, devoted to helping Hasidic Jews flee their religion. He couldn't even give away his money without picking a fight.

By pretty much every account, Eisman was a curious character. And he'd walked onto Wall Street at the very beginning of a curious phase. The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans. At first the new bond market machine concerned itself with the more solvent half of the American population. Now, with the extension of the mortgage bond market into the affairs of less creditworthy Americans, it found its fuel in the debts of the less solvent half.

The mortgage bond was different in important ways from old-fas.h.i.+oned corporate and government bonds. A mortgage bond wasn't a single giant loan for an explicit fixed term. A mortgage bond was a claim on the cash flows from a pool of thousands of individual home mortgages. These cash flows were always problematic, as the borrowers had the right to pay off any time they pleased. This was the single biggest reason that bond investors initially had been reluctant to invest in home mortgage loans: Mortgage borrowers typically repaid their loans only when interest rates fell, and they could refinance more cheaply, leaving the owner of a mortgage bond holding a pile of cash, to invest at lower interest rates. The investor in home loans didn't know how long his investment would last, only that he would get his money back when he least wanted it. To limit this uncertainty, the people I'd worked with at Salomon Brothers, who created the mortgage bond market, had come up with a clever solution. They took giant pools of home loans and carved up the payments made by homeowners into pieces, called tranches. The buyer of the first tranche was like the owner of the ground floor in a flood: He got hit with the first wave of mortgage prepayments. In exchange, he received a higher interest rate. The buyer of the second tranche--the second story of the skysc.r.a.per--took the next wave of prepayments and in exchange received the second highest interest rate, and so on. The investor in the top floor of the building received the lowest rate of interest but had the greatest a.s.surance that his investment wouldn't end before he wanted it to.

The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all. The pool of loans underlying the mortgage bond conformed to the standards, in their size and the credit quality of the borrowers, set by one of several government agencies: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae. The loans carried, in effect, government guarantees; if the homeowners defaulted, the government paid off their debts. When Steve Eisman stumbled into this new, rapidly growing industry of specialty finance, the mortgage bond was about to be put to a new use: making loans that did not qualify for government guarantees. The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned.

The mortgage bonds created from subprime home loans extended the logic invented to address the problem of early repayment to cope with the problem of no repayment at all. The investor in the first floor, or tranche, would be exposed not to prepayments but to actual losses. He took the first losses until his investment was entirely wiped out, whereupon the losses. .h.i.t the guy on the second floor. And so on.

In the early 1990s, just a pair of Wall Street a.n.a.lysts devoted their careers to understanding the effects of extending credit into places where that sun didn't often s.h.i.+ne. Steve Eisman was one; the other was Sy Jacobs. Jacobs had gone through the same Salomon Brothers training program that I had, and now worked for a small investment bank called Alex Brown. "I sat through the Salomon training program and got to hear what this great new securitization model Lewie Ranieri was creating was going to do," he recalls. (Ranieri was the closest thing the mortgage bond market had to a founding father.) The implications of turning home mortgages into bonds were mind-bogglingly vast. One man's liability had always been another man's a.s.set, but now more and more of the liabilities could be turned into bits of paper that you could sell to anyone. In short order, the Salomon Brothers trading floor gave birth to small markets in bonds funded by all sorts of strange stuff: credit card receivables, aircraft leases, auto loans, health club dues. To invent a new market was only a matter of finding a new a.s.set to hock. The most obvious untapped a.s.set in America was still the home. People with first mortgages had vast amounts of equity locked up in their houses; why shouldn't this untapped equity, too, be securitized? "The thinking in subprime," says Jacobs, "was there was this social stigma to being a second mortgage borrower and there really shouldn't be. If your credit rating was a little worse, you paid a lot more--and a lot more than you really should. If we can ma.s.s market the bonds, we can drive down the cost to borrowers. They can replace high interest rate credit card debt with lower interest rate mortgage debt. And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

The growing interface between high finance and lower-middle-cla.s.s America was a.s.sumed to be good for lower-middle-cla.s.s America. This new efficiency in the capital markets would allow lower-middle-cla.s.s Americans to pay lower and lower interest rates on their debts. In the early 1990s, the first subprime mortgage lenders--The Money Store, Greentree, Aames--sold shares to the public, so that they might grow faster. By the mid-1990s, dozens of small consumer lending companies were coming to market each year. The subprime lending industry was fragmented. Because the lenders sold many--though not all--of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. "It was a fast-buck business," says Jacobs. "Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people. That was the seamy underbelly of the good idea. Eisman and I both believed in the big idea and we both met some really sleazy characters. That was our job: to figure out which of the characters were the right ones to pull off the big idea."

Subprime mortgage lending was still a trivial fraction of the U.S. credit markets--a few tens of billions in loans each year--but its existence made sense, even to Steve Eisman. "I thought it was partly a response to growing income inequality," he said. "The distribution of income in this country was skewed and becoming more skewed, and the result was that you have more subprime customers." Of course, Eisman was paid to see the sense in subprime lending: Oppenheimer quickly became one of the leading bankers to the new industry, in no small part because Eisman was one of its leading proponents. "I took a lot of subprime companies public," says Eisman. "And the story they liked to tell was that 'we're helping the consumer. Because we're taking him out of his high interest rate credit card debt and putting him into lower interest rate mortgage debt.' And I believed that story." Then something changed.

Vincent Daniel had grown up in Queens, without any of the perks Steve Eisman took for granted. And yet if you met them you might guess that it was Vinny who had grown up in high style on Park Avenue and Eisman who had been raised in the small duplex on Eighty-second Avenue. Eisman was brazen and grandiose and focused on the big kill. Vinny was careful and wary and interested in details. He was young and fit, with thick, dark hair and handsome features, but his appearance was overshadowed by his concerned expression--mouth ever poised to frown, eyebrows ever ready to rise. He had little to lose but still seemed perpetually worried that something important was about to be taken from him. His father had been murdered when he was a small boy--though no one ever talked about that--and his mother had found a job as a bookkeeper at a commodities trading firm. She'd raised Vinny and his brother alone. Maybe it was Queens, maybe it was what had happened to his father, or maybe it was just the way Vincent Daniel was wired, but he viewed his fellow man with the most intense suspicion. It was with the awe of a champion speaking of an even greater champion that Steve Eisman said, "Vinny is had grown up in Queens, without any of the perks Steve Eisman took for granted. And yet if you met them you might guess that it was Vinny who had grown up in high style on Park Avenue and Eisman who had been raised in the small duplex on Eighty-second Avenue. Eisman was brazen and grandiose and focused on the big kill. Vinny was careful and wary and interested in details. He was young and fit, with thick, dark hair and handsome features, but his appearance was overshadowed by his concerned expression--mouth ever poised to frown, eyebrows ever ready to rise. He had little to lose but still seemed perpetually worried that something important was about to be taken from him. His father had been murdered when he was a small boy--though no one ever talked about that--and his mother had found a job as a bookkeeper at a commodities trading firm. She'd raised Vinny and his brother alone. Maybe it was Queens, maybe it was what had happened to his father, or maybe it was just the way Vincent Daniel was wired, but he viewed his fellow man with the most intense suspicion. It was with the awe of a champion speaking of an even greater champion that Steve Eisman said, "Vinny is dark. dark."

Eisman was an upper-middle-cla.s.s kid who had been faintly surprised when he wound up at Penn instead of Yale. Vinny was a lower-middle-cla.s.s kid whose mother was proud of him for getting into any college at all and prouder still when, in 1994, after Vinny graduated from SUNY-Binghamton, he'd gotten himself hired in Manhattan by Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that would be destroyed a few years later, in the Enron scandal. "Growing up in Queens, you very quickly figure out where the money is," said Vinny. "It's in Manhattan." His first a.s.signment in Manhattan, as a junior accountant, was to audit Salomon Brothers. He was instantly struck by the opacity of an investment bank's books. None of his fellow accountants was able to explain why the traders were doing what they were doing. "I didn't know what I was doing," said Vinny. "But the scary thing was, my managers didn't know anything either. I asked these basic questions--like, Why do they own this mortgage bond? Are they just betting on it, or is it part of some larger strategy? I thought I needed to know. It's really difficult to audit a company if you can't connect the dots."

He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant a.s.signed to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money. They were giant black boxes, whose hidden gears were in constant motion. Several months into the audit, Vinny's manager grew tired of his questions. "He couldn't explain it to me. He said, 'Vinny, it's not your job. I hired you to do XYZ, do XYZ and shut your mouth.' I walked out of his office and said, 'I gotta get out of here.'"

Vinny went looking for another job. An old school friend of his worked at a place called Oppenheimer and Co. and was making good money. He handed Vinny's resume in to human resources, and it made its way to Steve Eisman, who turned out to be looking for someone to help him pa.r.s.e the increasingly arcane accounting used by subprime mortgage originators. "I can't add," says Eisman. "I think in stories. I need help with numbers." Vinny heard that Eisman could be difficult and was surprised that, when they met, Eisman seemed interested only in whether they'd be able to get along. "He seemed to be just looking for a good egg," says Vinny. They'd met twice when Eisman phoned him out of the blue. Vinny a.s.sumed he was about to be offered a job, but soon after they started to talk, Eisman received an emergency call on the other line and put Vinny on hold. Vinny sat waiting for fifteen minutes in silence, but Eisman never came back on the line.

Two months later, Eisman called him back. When could Vinny start?

Eisman didn't particularly recall why he had put Vinny on hold and never picked up again, any more than he recalled why he had gone to the bathroom in the middle of lunch with a big-time CEO and never returned. Vinny soon found his own explanation: When he'd picked up the other line, Eisman had been informed that his first child, a newborn son named Max, had died. Valerie, sick with the flu, had been awakened by a night nurse, who informed her that she, the night nurse, had rolled on top of the baby in her sleep and smothered him. A decade later, the people closest to Eisman would describe this as an event that changed his relations.h.i.+p to the world around him. "Steven always thought he had an angel on his shoulder," said Valerie. "Nothing bad ever happened to Steven. He was protected and he was safe. After Max, the angel on his shoulder was done. Anything can happen to anyone at any time." From that moment, she noticed many changes in her husband, large and small, and Eisman did not disagree. "From the point of view of the history of the universe, Max's death was not a big deal," said Eisman. "It was just my big deal."

At any rate, Vinny and Eisman never talked about what had happened. All Vinny knew was that the Eisman he went to work for was obviously not quite the same Eisman he'd met several months earlier. The Eisman Vinny had interviewed with was, by the standards of Wall Street a.n.a.lysts, honest. He was not completely uncooperative. Oppenheimer was among the leading bankers to the subprime mortgage industry. They never would have been given the banking business if Eisman, their noisiest a.n.a.lyst, had not been willing to say nice things about them. Much as he enjoyed bas.h.i.+ng the less viable companies, he accepted that the subprime lending industry was a useful addition to the U.S. economy. His willingness to be rude about a few of these subprime originators was, in a way, useful. It lent credibility to his recommendations of the others.

Eisman was now about to become noticeably more negatively disposed, in ways that, from the point of view of his employer, were financially counterproductive. "It was like he'd smelled something," said Vinny. "And he needed my help figuring out what it was he'd smelled." Eisman wanted to write a report that more or less d.a.m.ned the entire industry, but he needed to be more careful than usual. "You can be positive and wrong on the sell side," says Vinny. "But if you're negative and wrong you get fired." Ammunition to cause trouble had just arrived a few months earlier from Moody's: The rating agency now possessed, and offered for sale, all sorts of new information about subprime mortgage loans. While the Moody's database did not allow you to examine individual loans, it offered a general picture of the pools of loans underlying individual mortgage bonds: how many were floating-rate, how many of the houses borrowed against were owner-occupied. Most importantly: how many were delinquent. "Here's this database," Eisman said simply. "Go into that room. Don't come out until you've figured out what it means." Vinny had the feeling Eisman already knew what it meant.

Vinny was otherwise on his own. "I'm twenty-six years old," he says, "and I haven't really understood what mortgage-backed securities really are." Eisman didn't know anything about them either--he was a stock market guy, and Oppenheimer didn't even have a bond department. Vinny had to teach himself. When he was done, he had an explanation for the unpleasant odor wafting from the subprime mortgage industry that Eisman had detected. These companies disclosed their ever-growing earnings, but not much else. One of the many items they failed to disclose was the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making. When Eisman had bugged them for these, they'd pretended that the fact was irrelevant, as they had sold all the loans off to people who packaged them into mortgage bonds: The risk was no longer theirs. This was untrue. All retained some small fraction of the loans they originated, and the companies were allowed to book as profit the expected future value of those loans. The accounting rules allowed them to a.s.sume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This a.s.sumption became the engine of their doom.

What first caught Vinny's eye were the high prepayments coming in from a sector called "manufactured housing." ("It sounds better than 'mobile homes.'") Mobile homes were different from the wheel-less kind: Their value dropped, like cars', the moment they left the store. The mobile home buyer, unlike the ordinary home buyer, couldn't expect to refinance in two years and take money out. Why were they prepaying so fast? Why were they prepaying so fast? Vinny asked himself. "It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary." "Involuntary prepayment" sounds better than "default." Mobile home buyers were defaulting on their loans, their mobile homes were being repossessed, and the people who had lent them money were receiving fractions of the original loans. "Eventually I saw that all the subprime sectors were either being prepaid or going bad at an incredible rate," said Vinny. "I was just seeing stunningly high delinquency rates in these pools." The interest rate on the loans wasn't high enough to justify the risk of lending to this particular slice of the American population. It was as if the ordinary rules of finance had been suspended in response to a social problem. A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans. Vinny asked himself. "It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary." "Involuntary prepayment" sounds better than "default." Mobile home buyers were defaulting on their loans, their mobile homes were being repossessed, and the people who had lent them money were receiving fractions of the original loans. "Eventually I saw that all the subprime sectors were either being prepaid or going bad at an incredible rate," said Vinny. "I was just seeing stunningly high delinquency rates in these pools." The interest rate on the loans wasn't high enough to justify the risk of lending to this particular slice of the American population. It was as if the ordinary rules of finance had been suspended in response to a social problem. A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

To sift every pool of subprime mortgage loans took him six months, but when he was done he came out of the room and gave Eisman the news. All these subprime lending companies were growing so rapidly, and using such goofy accounting, that they could mask the fact that they had no real earnings, just illusory, accounting-driven, ones. They had the essential feature of a Ponzi scheme: To maintain the fiction that they were profitable enterprises, they needed more and more capital to create more and more subprime loans. "I wasn't actually a hundred percent sure I was right," said Vinny, "but I go to Steve and say, 'This really doesn't look good.' That was all he needed to know. I think what he needed was evidence to downgrade the stock."

The report Eisman wrote trashed all of the subprime originators; one by one, he exposed the deceptions of a dozen companies. "Here is the difference," he said, "between the view of the world they are presenting to you and the actual numbers." The subprime companies did not appreciate his effort. "He created a s.h.i.+tstorm," said Vinny. "All these subprime companies were calling and hollering at him: You're wrong. Your data's wrong You're wrong. Your data's wrong. And he just hollered back at them, 'It's YOUR f.u.c.king data!'" One of the reasons Eisman's report disturbed so many is that he'd failed to give the companies he'd insulted fair warning. He'd violated the Wall Street code. "Steve knew this was going to create a s.h.i.+tstorm," said Vinny. "And he wanted to create the s.h.i.+tstorm. And he didn't want to be talked out of it. And if he told them, he'd have had all these people trying to talk him out of it."

"We were never able to evaluate the loans before because we never had the data," said Eisman later. "My name was wedded to this industry. My entire reputation had been built on covering these stocks. If I was wrong, that would be the end of the career of Steve Eisman."

Eisman published his report in September 1997, in the middle of what appeared to be one of the greatest economic booms in U.S. history. Less than a year later, Russia defaulted and a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management went bankrupt. In the subsequent flight to safety, the early subprime lenders were denied capital and promptly went bankrupt en ma.s.se. Their failure was interpreted as an indictment of their accounting practices, which allowed them to record profits before they were realized. No one but Vinny, so far as Vinny could tell, ever really understood the c.r.a.ppiness of the loans they had made. "It made me feel good that there was such inefficiency to this market," he said. "Because if the market catches on to everything, I probably have the wrong job. You can't add anything by looking at this arcane stuff, so why bother? But I was the only guy I knew who was covering companies that were all going to go bust during the greatest economic boom we'll ever see in my lifetime. I saw how the sausage was made in the economy and it was really freaky."

That was the moment it first became clear that Eisman wasn't just a little cynical. He held a picture of the financial world in his head that was radically different from, and less flattering than, the financial world's self-portrait. A few years later, he quit his job and went to work for a giant hedge fund called Chilton Investment. He'd lost interest in telling other people where to put their money. He thought he might be able to remain interested if he managed money himself and bet on his own judgments. Having hired Eisman, Chilton Investment had second thoughts. "The whole thing about Steve," said a Chilton colleague, "was, 'Yeah, he's a really smart guy. But can he pick stocks?'" Chilton decided that he couldn't and relegated him to his old role of a.n.a.lyzing companies for the guy who actually made the investment decisions. Eisman hated it, but he did it, and in doing it he learned something that prepared him uniquely for the crisis that was about to occur. He learned what was really going on inside the market for consumer loans. the moment it first became clear that Eisman wasn't just a little cynical. He held a picture of the financial world in his head that was radically different from, and less flattering than, the financial world's self-portrait. A few years later, he quit his job and went to work for a giant hedge fund called Chilton Investment. He'd lost interest in telling other people where to put their money. He thought he might be able to remain interested if he managed money himself and bet on his own judgments. Having hired Eisman, Chilton Investment had second thoughts. "The whole thing about Steve," said a Chilton colleague, "was, 'Yeah, he's a really smart guy. But can he pick stocks?'" Chilton decided that he couldn't and relegated him to his old role of a.n.a.lyzing companies for the guy who actually made the investment decisions. Eisman hated it, but he did it, and in doing it he learned something that prepared him uniquely for the crisis that was about to occur. He learned what was really going on inside the market for consumer loans.

The year was now 2002. There were no public subprime lending companies left in America. There was, however, an ancient consumer lending giant called Household Finance Corporation. Created in the 1870s, it had long been a leader in the field. Eisman understood the company well, he thought, until he realized that he didn't. In early 2002 he got his hands on Household's new sales doc.u.ment offering home equity loans. The company's CEO, Bill Aldinger, had grown Household even as his compet.i.tors went bankrupt. Americans, digesting the Internet bust, seemed in no position to take on new debts, and yet Household was making loans at a faster pace than ever. A big source of its growth had been the second mortgage. The doc.u.ment offered a fifteen-year, fixed-rate loan, but it was bizarrely disguised as a thirty-year loan. It took the stream of payments the homeowner would make to Household over fifteen years, spread it hypothetically over thirty years, and asked: If you were making the same dollar payments over thirty years that you are in fact making over fifteen, what would your "effective rate" of interest be? It was a weird, dishonest sales pitch. The borrower was told he had an "effective interest rate of 7 percent" when he was in fact paying something like 12.5 percent. "It was blatant fraud," said Eisman. "They were tricking their customers."

It didn't take long for Eisman to find complaints from borrowers who had figured out what had just happened to them. He scoured small newspapers around the country. In the town of Bellingham, Was.h.i.+ngton--the last city of any size before you reach Canada--he found a reporter named John Stark, who wrote for the Bellingham News Bellingham News. Before Eisman called him out of the blue, Stark had written a small piece about four locals who thought they had been deceived by Household and found a plaintiff's attorney willing to sue the company and void the mortgage contracts. "I was skeptical at first," says Stark. "I thought, Here's another person who has borrowed too much money and hired a lawyer. I wasn't too sympathetic." When the piece was published, it drew a crowd: Hundreds of people in and around Bellingham had picked up the newspaper to discover that their 7 percent mortgage was in fact a 12.5 percent mortgage. "People were coming out of the woodwork," says Stark. "They were angry. A lot of them didn't realize what had happened to them."

Whatever Eisman was meant to be doing got pushed to one side. His job became a single-minded crusade against the Household Finance Corporation. He alerted newspaper reporters, he called up magazine writers, he became friendly with the a.s.sociation of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which must be the first time a guy from a Wall Street hedge fund exhibited such interest in an organization devoted to guarding the interests of the poor. He repeatedly pestered the office of the attorney general of the state of Was.h.i.+ngton. He was incredulous to learn that the attorney general had investigated Household and then been prevented, by a state judge by a state judge, from releasing the results of his investigation. Eisman obtained a copy; its contents confirmed his worst suspicions. "I would say to the guy in the attorney general's office, 'Why aren't you arresting people?' He'd say, 'They're a powerful company. If they're gone, who would make subprime loans in the state of Was.h.i.+ngton?' I said, 'Believe me, there will be a train full of people coming to lend money.'"

Really, it was a federal issue. Household was peddling these deceptive mortgages all over the country. Yet the federal government failed to act. Instead, at the end of 2002, Household settled a cla.s.s action suit out of court and agreed to pay a $484 million fine distributed to twelve states. The following year it sold itself, and its giant portfolio of subprime loans, for $15.5 billion to the British financial conglomerate the HSBC Group.

Eisman was genuinely shocked. "It never entered my mind that this could possibly happen," he said. "This wasn't just another company--this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his f.u.c.king t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. Instead they sold the company and the CEO made a hundred million dollars. And I thought, Whoa! That one didn't end the way it should have Whoa! That one didn't end the way it should have." His pessimism toward high finance was becoming tinged with political ideas. "That's when I started to see the social implications," he said. "If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you'd design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least."

Eisman left work at noon every Wednesday so that he might be present at Midtown Comics when the new s.h.i.+pment of stories arrived. He knew more than any grown man should about the lives of various superheroes. He knew the Green Lantern oath by heart, for instance, and understood Batman's inner life better than the Caped Crusader himself. Before the death of his son, Eisman had read the adult versions of the comics he'd read as a child--Spider-Man was his favorite. Now he read only the darkest adult comics, and favored those that took familiar fairy tales and rearranged them without changing any of the facts, so that the story became less familiar, and something other than a fairy tale. "Telling a story that is consistent with everything that happened before," as he put it. "And yet the story is totally different. And it leads you to look at the earlier episodes differently." He preferred relations between Snow White and the dwarves to be a bit more fraught. Now a fairy tale was being reinvented before his eyes in the financial markets. "I started to look more closely at what a subprime mortgage loan was all about," he said. "A subprime auto loan is in some ways honest because it's at a fixed rate. They may be charging you high fees and ripping your heart out, but at least you know it. The subprime mortgage loan was a cheat. You're basically drawing someone in by telling them, 'You're going to pay off all your other loans--your credit card debt, your auto loans--by taking this one loan. And look at the low rate!' But that low rate isn't the real rate. It's a teaser rate." was his favorite. Now he read only the darkest adult comics, and favored those that took familiar fairy tales and rearranged them without changing any of the facts, so that the story became less familiar, and something other than a fairy tale. "Telling a story that is consistent with everything that happened before," as he put it. "And yet the story is totally different. And it leads you to look at the earlier episodes differently." He preferred relations between Snow White and the dwarves to be a bit more fraught. Now a fairy tale was being reinvented before his eyes in the financial markets. "I started to look more closely at what a subprime mortgage loan was all about," he said. "A subprime auto loan is in some ways honest because it's at a fixed rate. They may be charging you high fees and ripping your heart out, but at least you know it. The subprime mortgage loan was a cheat. You're basically drawing someone in by telling them, 'You're going to pay off all your other loans--your credit card debt, your auto loans--by taking this one loan. And look at the low rate!' But that low rate isn't the real rate. It's a teaser rate."

Obsessing over Household, he attended a lunch organized by a big Wall Street firm. The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. "Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model," recalls Eisman. "And he said, 'Turn off your tape recorders.' Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people--in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks."

Eisman asked, "Are any regulators interested in this?"

"No," said Sandler.

"That's when I decided the system was really, 'f.u.c.k the poor.'"

In his youth, Eisman had been a strident Republican. He joined right-wing organizations, voted for Reagan twice, and even loved Robert Bork. It wasn't until he got to Wall Street, oddly, that his politics drifted left. He attributed his first baby steps back to the middle of the political spectrum to the end of the cold war. "I wasn't as right-wing because there wasn't as much to be right-wing about." By the time Household's CEO, Bill Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market's first socialist. "When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. "I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off." youth, Eisman had been a strident Republican. He joined right-wing organizations, voted for Reagan twice, and even loved Robert Bork. It wasn't until he got to Wall Street, oddly, that his politics drifted left. He attributed his first baby steps back to the middle of the political spectrum to the end of the cold war. "I wasn't as right-wing because there wasn't as much to be right-wing about." By the time Household's CEO, Bill Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market's first socialist. "When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. "I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off."