Mac1958
Diamond Member
One of the very few institutional investors who saw the 2008 Financial Meltdown coming was a hedge fund manager named Steve Eisman, who is featured heavily in the book and movie The Big Short. He personally researched what was happening and bet heavily against the real estate market. Personally I did a lot of talks for finance-oriented companies on the Meltdown, and Eisman's experiences were an important part of my talk.
The Meltdown was far more complicated and broad than most people know. We also came within hours, literally hours, of having no money in our neighborhood ATMs and no food in grocery stores. Few people know how close the world came to complete collapse.
We're still feeling the effects of the Meltdown today, but that's another story.
What was the main driver? It was an explosion of incredibly complex and high-paying financial derivatives and synthetic derivatives that few people understood, insane leverage taken by most of the country's biggest banks, financial institutions betting against the very derivatives they were selling, and an aggressive refusal of key players to properly rate, control and regulate a derivatives market that had gone completely off the rails.
If you really want the big picture, here are two videos Eisman has released that explain what happened. These things are pretty dense, so you may want to pause them to check on language he uses.
The Meltdown was far more complicated and broad than most people know. We also came within hours, literally hours, of having no money in our neighborhood ATMs and no food in grocery stores. Few people know how close the world came to complete collapse.
We're still feeling the effects of the Meltdown today, but that's another story.
What was the main driver? It was an explosion of incredibly complex and high-paying financial derivatives and synthetic derivatives that few people understood, insane leverage taken by most of the country's biggest banks, financial institutions betting against the very derivatives they were selling, and an aggressive refusal of key players to properly rate, control and regulate a derivatives market that had gone completely off the rails.
If you really want the big picture, here are two videos Eisman has released that explain what happened. These things are pretty dense, so you may want to pause them to check on language he uses.
