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

“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.”

In the middle was John Paulson. At the top was Steve Eisman.

Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What’s strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.

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.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. —Leo Tolstoy, 1897

Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

“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.”