Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part of his speech about Option One's subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. "It wasn't a Q&A," says Moses. "The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve's hand and says, "Yes?'"
"Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?" Eisman asked.
A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech.
Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no, Moses thought. "The one thing Steve always says," Daniel explains, "is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always lie to you." Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these subprime lenders but didn't see the need for him to express it here in this manner. For Eisman wasn't raising his hand to ask a question. He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said.
"Yes?" the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. "Is that another question?"
"No," said Eisman. "It's a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent." The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman's cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. "Excuse me," he said, standing up. "But I need to take this call." And with that, he walked out.
His dinner companion in Las Vegas ran a fund of about $15 billion and managed C.D.O.'s backed by the BBB tranche of a mortgage bond, or as Eisman puts it, "the equivalent of three levels of dog sh*t lower than the original bonds."
FrontPoint had spent a lot of time digging around in the dog sh*t and knew that the default rates were already sufficient to wipe out this guy's entire portfolio. "God, you must be having a hard time," Eisman told his dinner companion.
"No," the guy said, "I've sold everything out."
Whatever rising anger Eisman felt was offset by the man's genial disposition. Not only did he not mind that Eisman took a dim view of his C.D.O.'s; he saw it as a basis for friendship. "Then he said something that blew my mind," Eisman tells me. "He says, "I love guys like you who short my market. Without you, I don't have anything to buy.' "
That's when Eisman finally got it. Here he'd been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren't enough Americans with sh*tty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren't satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?"
Steve Eisman had virtually no respect for the large Wall Street firms, particularly Merrill Lynch. His speech below is reminiscent of Tom Joad's memorable "I'll be there" dialogue in The Grapes of Wrath:
"We have a simple thesis," Eisman explained. "There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there." When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman's logic--the logic of Wall Street's pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain.
As the financial system crashed on September 18, 2008 and the protagonists of the story became rich beyond all belief, there was no joy. They weren't happy that they had been proven right. They were disgusted by the entire Wall Street culture. Michael Burry shut down his fund in disgust with his ungrateful investors. The system broke and the Wall Street gamblers should have paid the consequences. Instead, the US taxpayer bailed them out. In the twenty years since Lewis had written Liar's Poker, Wall Street became greedier,nastier, more corrupt, more arrogant and more incompetent. He traced the biggest financial disaster in history back to his old boss John Gutfreund. His decision to convert Salomon Brothers from a private partnership to a public corporation opened Pandora's Box. The other Wall Street partnerships followed like lemmings. The risk of failure was shifted from the partners to the shareholders and the citizens of the United States. Lewis details this fateful decision:
From that moment, though, the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith.
No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.'s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.'s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit.
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