Why Didn't Greenspan See the Crash Coming?

April 5, 2010 - PRLog -- Michael Burry, a Bay Area-based hedge fund manager, argues that not only did he foresee the crash in the US housing market - he successfully used credit default swap derivatives to protect himself and his clients from going down with it. Given this, he argues Alan Greenspan is either hopelessly wrong or lying when he claims no one foresaw it: "academia, the Federal Reserve, the regulators". Well, we've talked previously about how conventional academic economics is a disease, so no surprise they they missed it ;-) .

And we all know not just the Cheney / Bush regime, but their predecessors Clinton / Rubin / Summers / Geithner came down hard on the one regulator who DEFINITELY saw it coming: the head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born, whom they all made sure was basically frozen out of the loop and publicly humiliated. And since the privately-owned Fed has always been a "go along to get along" scheme since its inception in 1913, especially when captained by Greenspan, an acolyte of serial-killer-loving Ayn Rand, who apparently genuinely thought " the market always knows best", that's hardly much of a shock either. But that no one has even ASKED Burry about his analysis in the time SINCE Black September 2008 ... well ... that says something - not good - about the level of both intellectual curiosity and moral integrity at large in American elite circles to this very day.

From the New York Times:

Back in 2005 and 2006, I argued as forcefully as I could, in letters to clients of my investment firm, Scion Capital, that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007, causing substantial damage to the economy. My prediction was based on my research into the residential mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities. After studying the regulatory filings related to those securities, I waited for the lenders to offer the most risky mortgages conceivable to the least qualified buyers. I knew that would mark the beginning of the end of the housing bubble; it would mean that prices had risen — with the expansion of easy mortgage lending — as high as they could go. I had begun to worry about the housing market back in 2003, when lenders first resurrected interest-only mortgages, loosening their credit standards to generate a greater volume of loans. Throughout 2004, I had watched as these mortgages were offered to more and more subprime borrowers — those with the weakest credit. The lenders generally then sold these risky loans to Wall Street to be packaged into mortgage-backed securities, thus passing along most of the risk. Increasingly, lenders concerned themselves more with the quantity of mortgages they sold than with their quality ...

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