The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Once you became an idea’s defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.

“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.”

It was as if Wall Street had decided to allow everyone to gamble on the punctuality of commercial airlines.

“All of a sudden I’ve become this caricature,” said Burry. “I’ve always been able to study up on something and ace something really fast. I thought it was all something special about me. Now it’s like, ‘Oh, a lot of Asperger’s people can do that.’ Now I was explained by a disorder.”

One man’s liability had always been another man’s asset, 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

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.

A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen.

That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.

the markets were predisposed to underestimating the likelihood of dramatic change.