Call me once they accept that they made millions of loans they shouldn't have made and accept that the losses are as much theirs as the homeowners.
And when they follow their own damn procedures, which they're still showing no sign of doing.
Then we'll see about some respect.
Anyone who claims this was very predictable and didn't make a bet is full of it.
So my error was not that I was full of it, just that I lacked the financial knowledge to maximize the benefit of the money that I had used to support my bet.
It's not about predictability, it's about timing!
Pretty much everyone except Wall Street and Washington knew by the middle of 2008 that bubble is about to burst. Of course very few if anyone predicted when exactly and to what extent it was going to happen. I got burned by mistiming my short and underestimating how devastating the crash will be.
Many people saw the dislocations in the market long before the crash, but would have gone bankrupt shorting that irrationality.
It's just damn hard to get the timing right.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/15/business/arm3...
My excuse was: it wasn't clear how to, there's always a timing issue (it's not necessarily enough to know it's inevitable, you gotta know when), and it's hard when you don't have a lot of other people's money to play with.
The answer to how it was done is in Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short. After learning how that guy did it, I don't feel so bad for not figuring it out.
My frustration is with someone claiming that they knew or that it was very predictable when they were simply WORRIED it would happen. Many of us worry about a lot of things. That doesn't mean when something finally goes wrong we get to say "see? I knew it would happen."
Or do you also have a problem with giving money to the needy?
