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Common and therefore interesting? What's interesting about it, if it's common?
Interesting in how common it is, perhaps?
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hey judging people who went through horrific experiences looks like fun! can I play?
> hey judging people who went through horrific experiences looks like fun! can I play? Those horrific experiences weren't accidents. They happened because enough folks said "it's okay for me to do {bad thing} because {excuse}". Also, imagine the response if it came out that a Pope or a Republican had done something similar.
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> hey judging people who went through horrific experiences looks like fun! can I play? Those horrific experiences weren't accidents. They happened because enough folks said "it's okay for me to do {bad thing} because {excuse}". Also, imagine the response if it came out that a Pope or a Republican had done something similar.
I have never bought the grassroots explanation of history, on the good or bad side. bad people bend good people and good systems to their purposes because they can. I'm wary about assigning excess blame to people responding to the incentives placed in front of them, even under ideal conditions. there are good reasons why intent plays such a large role in our conception of justice.
Actually, the reason that we consider intent is that we think that intent has some bearing on outcome. The argument is "but for {unexpected}, the outcome would have been good".
However, if {unexpected} is not actually unexpected, that argument does not apply.
> I'm wary about assigning excess blame to people responding to the incentives placed in front of them, even under ideal conditions.
In what universe is it "excess" to blame someone for the expected outcome of their actions?
They got some benefit for cooperating with evil - why is it wrong to blame them for that?
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I did; what's the problem with my comment? Just to add: lots of people also bet against bubbles at any point of time of the bubble. But they were forced out of business before the bubbles could even burst( "Market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"). Only a handful survived and we thought that they have special skills or magic formula. You underestimate the element of luck in the world of inves…
Timing is everything, but Burry was careful to find a long-term bet with limited downside. He wasn't shorting stocks - he was buying credit-default swaps which are essentially insurance policies. "For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a 10-year credit-default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for 10 years. The most you could make was $…
You'll never know when the bubbles will burst.
A lot of people are suggesting that it was immoral of Burry to profit from his insight instead of warning people of the impending calamity, yet what message speaks more forcefully? Saying you think the market is going to implode, vs. paying millions of dollars to insure specifically against that happening? No one would have listened to his warning, and indeed his investors didn't like hearing it. Burry is not the bad…
Instead of profiting off people suffering from bad investments in housing, Burry should have stuck with his career in neurology and profited off people suffering from brain cancer.
How does one go from being active on investment forums to securing a few million from very experienced investors.
It is one of those one in billion occurences. I am sure Mike Burry would have done alright even without it, but still there must be more to the story.
Hopefully, full book goes into more detail.
It's great that this guy has a gift but let's call what he does for what it is: exploitation. Countless pension funds and state budgets are in shambles because of people like him.
Wrong. He was simply betting that subprime loans were a huge risk that was going to go bust. If you need to blame someone, go for the people who made these loans in the first place, or the ratings companies for failing to spot the disaster.
It's great that this guy has a gift but let's call what he does for what it is: exploitation. Countless pension funds and state budgets are in shambles because of people like him.
The people you should be mad at are the ones that actually created the problem in the first place. These problems wouldn't have existed without the Federal Reserve's low interest rates and politicians like Barney Frank who enabled the GSEs. You should be outraged at the arrogance of those people who think that they can make decisions for the entire country that should be made by millions of informed individuals.
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Why would I be joking. How is expecting the common decency from a fellow human being to tell you that you're standing on a live train track funny? The money managers/investors screwed over an entire economy because they were greedy and were willing to exploit esoteric financial laws/practices and consumer ignorance to sacrifice money that wasn't their own. There is no joke here.
Any con game relies on the greed of the mark.
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Instead of profiting off people suffering from bad investments in housing, Burry should have stuck with his career in neurology and profited off people suffering from brain cancer.
In the article he described in several ways how he had no real interest in medicine, just drifting into it because it seemed easy to study, and was physically repelled by the sight of people being operated on. This is not the kind of person you want operating on you.