Читать книгу The Most Dangerous Trade - Teitelbaum Richard - Страница 4

At its crux, short selling is about failure. Things break down. Whereas most of mankind basks in a natural optimism, there are those who navigate the darker side of events – the miscalculations, fraud, and follies that spur us onward toward disaster. Catastrophe's natural handmaidens are greed and, yes, plain evil.

The natural state of a collapsing universe is the breaking down of order. Short sellers understand this and seek to profit from it.

I knew these dynamics before starting this project in 2012. After all, I quoted the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in college and still enthuse over Samuel Beckett plays. In hindsight, I'm embarrassed to say, my effort was more about careerism than anything else. Colleagues and rivals were churning out acclaimed books in the wake of the 2008–2009 financial crisis. I was toiling for Bloomberg News, at a sparsely read monthly magazine under the yoke of a petulant editor. Yes, I was proud of a good portion of my work – racking up a record 23 cover stories. Some of it explored the underside of the financial crisis. But my peers were on Charlie Rose or, worse, had even penned movie deals.

John Wiley & Sons approached me, suggesting I write a book profiling short sellers – something I suspect they soon came to regret. Short sellers, a misfit breed of investor tilting against the relentless onslaught of hype emanating from Wall Street's powerful marketing machinary, make a colorful cast of characters – an assortment of loners, firebrands, cynics, liars, and losers. What could go wrong?

My paranoid suspicion – evidence for which is utterly circumstantial – is that the wheels began to fall off the project before it began, with an investigative story I wrote for the January 2012 issue of the magazine. In July 2008, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson met at the offices of Eton Park Capital Management with a group of hedge fund managers and other Wall Street types, many of them alumni of Goldman Sachs, where he was CEO from 1999 to 2006. According to a source at the meeting, the secretary disclosed material nonpublic information – that the government was planning to put mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship – wiping out equity holders in those state-sponsored companies. Disclosing this was not illegal, as I reported, citing legal experts. Yet Paulson had recently said such a move was unlikely.

Nothing much came of that story until September 2012, when the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) had launched an investigation into the matter. I was on book leave, and Bloomberg News did not, according to standard practice, match the story. Nothing much seems to have come of the SEC investigation.

Except perhaps this: A month or so after the Journal story, while still on book leave, I was summoned to Bloomberg headquarters and informed that I was being demoted to essentially a data entry position. They somehow neglected to change my senior writer title. Of course plenty of people are demoted all the time. Later, Bloomberg LP revealed that then-mayor Michael Bloomberg had a business relationship with Paulson. Indeed, they are co-chairs of an environmental organization called the Risky Business Project, along with ex-hedge fund manager and Goldman Sachs alumnus Thomas Steyer.

But if this book was to chronicle breakdowns – financial, regulatory, ethical, structural – my star-crossed efforts to bring the project together seemed to eerily reflect that. Subjects declined to be interviewed. Others did so only off the record. I was given bogus information, including a false address by one subject, and others claimed to have no record of past returns. A retired woman short seller relayed to me that she had become so averse to the short-selling profession that she no longer dated men under six feet tall.

One source, after an Italian dinner in a rough part of town, asked to talk to me on “deep background” in a dark and deserted parking lot behind the restaurant, away from prying eyes and ears. I thought, briefly, I was about to get whacked.

Bad news mounted. The façade of my Greenwich Village apartment building required immediate replacement, costing $30 million in total. The jackhammers were merciless. On the eve of a key investment conference in Dallas, Superstorm Sandy swamped New York. My flight was canceled, scuttling interviews, and the resulting floodwaters knocked out electricity and forced battalions of mice into my co-op, necessitating bouts of successive efforts to eradicate them. Fortunately, we already had a good exterminator, because my crisscrossing of the country staying at cheap hotels had ushered in a virulent infestation of bed bugs. Interestingly, they seemed to prefer my voluminous cartons of interview notes and books to our beds.

The last of my roster of short sellers agreed, after initial refusals, to cooperate in the first half of 2013. I was on course to blow my deadline not by weeks but months. Like so much else, in this project, it was humbling, embarrassing – but nothing like what I was about to experience.

On July 5, the lion's share of reporting and writing was complete. My book leave had ended and the new job in data entry was going surprisingly well, in its own fashion.

The phone rang. It was from the hospital. My special-needs daughter Nina was in septic shock. “It's bad,” the doctor intoned, when my wife passed the phone to him, panic in his voice. “It's really bad.”

Toxins were filling her body. The window of opportunity to arrest it is vanishingly small – every hour from its inception increases the mortality rate by 20 percent, I've been told.

A series of operations on Nina proved successful – she would spend months in and out of intensive care. I returned to data entry at Bloomberg, but struggled to complete my remaining chapters with my daughter in the hospital. She is recovering.

Next came a series of unrelated deaths in a staccato procession: A brother-in-law (of a heart attack), my 90-year-old mother-in-law, and my first editor at Fortune magazine, John Curran, 59 (of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Sources and characters in my narrative were dying, too —Barron's Alan Abelson, 87, died of a heart attack, and Doug Millett, 49, formerly of Kynikos Associates and largely responsible for exposing the Enron fraud, succumbed to a cancer of the salivary glands. Already suspicious, I was fast becoming superstitious.

In November 2013, Bloomberg LP, in company argot, fired me – along with a raft of vastly more talented journalists. Another phenomenally expensive operation for Nina lay ahead, but of course I had no idea whether her medical care had influenced the decision (Nina's hospital tab for her first night was $330,637.54). Short sellers had taught me that paranoia is often well-founded. “What you see,” one short seller told me, “is not what really is.”

Fictions and delusions collapse as a consequence of their internal dynamics. Bad things happen. That's the most important thing that short sellers – damaged, battered, often nearly broke – can remind us. If they make a buck or two in the process, who am I to judge?