Big Short For The Money Ball Boys

The Big Short:  Adam McKay, Michael Lewis and the Heartbreaking, but Lucrative Nature of Betting Against Success

by Carmine Nuhturs, CPW News Service

     The stellar cast of  Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell aside, the super successful friend of Wall Street, Michael Lewis, whose story The Big Short, like Money Ball, is as flawed as Enron's "hypothetical future value".   It is also on the upside of a rollercoaster ride down Wall Street for all the Flash Boys of the hedge funds and post-2008 credit defaulting bamboozles.

      “It’s all in the nature of the betting on Wall Street,” said Hymen Lohman of Lohman, Weilding and Brandish investment advisors of Luxemburg, a company that invests in non-sub-prime investments of enduring and responsibly researched securities.   Lohman believes that Michael Lewis is a front man for Wall Street like Vernon Loeb, formerly of the Washington Post, was the front man for spinning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the backs of Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch and even General David Petraeus.   “Loeb dredged up....and I mean some deep dredging that annoyed the Tillman family so much that the went to Congress....the positive spin on the Tillman friendly fire incident.   Well, the truth of the friendly fire part came later, actually.   The Jessica Lynch mishegoss was followed by Loeb co-writing All In:  The Education of General David Petraeus with Paula Broadwell. In all, Loeb built consent for war while Lewis builds consent for Wall Street’s investment houses and the big banks even as he also provides a type of critique to which firms like Goldman Sacks can point and say “See.  It’s all open and above board.” 

    Is it?  Lewis wasn’t up front with Money Ball.   His claims that the metrics used to make successful major league baseball teams were myth as evidenced by the writing of Winsip Custer on the subject. 

   It lined up alongside Wall Street's incomprehensible financial formulas of Black Scholes and Robert Merton's metrics and the credit default formulations that tanked the economy and led to the unbelievable 2008 rape of the U.S. taxpayers that followed the post 1999 repeal of the Glass Steagall Act.    Glass Steagall kept up an essential firewall between Wall Street and the big banks, but it had not protected the S&L’s of the 80’s. which didn't need Hank Paulson's Chicken Little drama since it had the FDIC coffers to plunder. Like the invading Mongols, Turks and Manchus making an end run around China's Great Wall, the 1980's S&L plunderers simply went around Glass Steagall by using the FDIC as the piggy bank. 

     Shortselling essentially provides a great opportunity for Wall Street malfeasance.   A dynamic new Mexican restaurant just went public and financed its expansion with Wall Street equity.  Then, pow! An untraceable rare virus sends dozens to the hospital and the stock tanks.   Prior knowledge of that event could make a short seller famously wealthy.  Whose is going to investigate?  The ex-Enron pensioners?  The ex-Worldcom employees?  The Columbia-HCA investors?

      The universal fail-safe position beyond Wall Street's "blue chips" is the gold and silver market.  They don’t have to call for a short-sell since they are the safe harbor for Wall Streets’ bamboozles, but their stockpiles of precious metals depend on the same type of equipment that the military uses to move weapons onto a battlefield…..Caterpillar tank tracks whose founders’ patents win on every conflict and strip mine.  Take Kyle Bass of Fort Worth, Texas only a few miles from where the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market.  Wars breed instability and Kyle Bass tells us his mother's advice was to "invest in gold and guns."

     Mad Money’s Jim Cramer loves Michael Lewis’ prolific penning of stories of American cultures’ iconic monied play grounds and whether Lewis is talking to Cramer or Charlie Rose, what’s not said is the obvious:   Reinstate Glass-Steagall the 1933 firewall that the Great Depression taught us was the condom needed when Big Banks and Big Wall Street investment houses seek to share their dangerous mixture of bodily fluids  to the detriment of the greater body politic. 
     Simply make short-selling illegal?  Could you imagine the effects of only betting on winners while leaving the Joe Sixpack investors out of the complicated credit default mumbo jumbo that not even Robert Merton, guru of credit default swaps whose father is the "father of applied sociology at Columbia University, the Hogwarts of mass media mind manipulation, regardless of his Nobel Prize for economics, understood that his work provided the smoke screen that allowed Goldman Sachs and others to do exactly what Senator Carl Levin showed from their emails was what they did to pedestrian Americans...."sold 'em some real shit."    Then, Wall Street blamed the housing bubble on the greedy bimbos of the sub-prime crowd who was to have received the "bailout" to bail them out.  Oops!  S&L's here we go again, but not by robbing the FDIC for the S&L bamboozle.  This time, 2008, they went straight up to the trough and gobbled with the Fed's and Congress' blessings.  "Greenspan's 'put' he had to confess had been a poot in our silly stupid faces," said one disgruntled Wall Street blow hole watcher.

     Michael Lewis, Adam McKay and the other shiny propagandists are making money on the wreckage and rubble of the Clinton/Gore removal of Glass-Steagall and the Bush/Cheney 2000-2008 replay of the 1980’s S&L and subsequent march toward another meltdown.  With the pool of average investors shrinking by nearly 30 percent since 2008 some are saying the current level of the comeback is another bamboozle while Stuart Varney is telling Americans to pray for higher gas prices so that stocks will rise, too.  In 2008 oil was over $100 a barrel, but why?

    One thing’s for sure, the Adams film like the Lewis story upon which it is based will not call for the criminalization of short selling.  It’s become too big!   Betting on other people's failures and downfalls has a very enticing up-side kind of like surfing a tsunami of a wave as its circling a big drain.