“That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice… They fucked people. They built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience.”
    – Steve Eisman
One decade before he became famous for the being the inspiration behind Mark Baum’s character, played by Steve Carell in the movie the “The Big Short”, Steve Eisman was making hundreds of millions predicting the next big short, namely the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. Which is why every appearance of the otherwise reclusive financial guru sees broad popular interest, and this past Sunday, when Eisman appeared at the beachfront Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where several thousand Wall Street securitization professionals are convening this week for their 22nd annual ABS East Conference, was no different.
Incidentally, it’s the same gathering where, in one scene of the film “The Big Short,” the character based on Eisman bursts into outrage at a mortgage
executive giving a talk.
Steve Eisman Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Eisman hadn’t attended a securitization conference since 2007. But Information Management Network, the organizer of an annual confab in Miami, decided to changed that when it invited him to give the keynote speech Sunday.
So what did Eisman have to say to the industry that he helped bring down? “You fuckers blew up planet earth. Shut up and move on.†adding that “it feels like Daniel in the lion’s den.”
Cited by the Asset Securitization Report, he then apologized in advance for offending his audience, and launched into an explanation of the mortgage crisis and an assessment of the current state of the economy and financial system, or “why things still suck.†The bottom line, in his view, we don’t have the three prerequisites for a full-blow crisis: too much leverage, a big asset class that blows up, and a lot of banks holding this asset class.
