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There was another, bigger financial crisis waiting to happen—the only question in Kyle Bass’s mind was when. At the end of 2008, he thought Greece would probably be the first to go, perhaps triggering a collapse of the euro. He thought it might happen within two years, but he didn’t have a lot of conviction about his timing. “Let’s say it takes five years and not two,” he said. “Let’s say it takes seven years. Should I wait until I see the whites of their eyes before I position myself, or should I position myself now? The answer is now. Because the moment people think it [national default] is a possibility, it’s expensive. If you wait, you have to pay up for the risk.”

When we met, he had just bought his first credit default swaps on the countries he and his team of analysts viewed as the most likely to be unable to pay off their debts: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, and Spain. He made these bets directly with the few big Wall Street firms that he felt were least likely to be allowed to fail—Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley—but, doubting their capacity to withstand a more serious crisis, he demanded that they post collateral on the trades every day. The prices he paid for default insurance, in retrospect, look absurdly cheap. Greek government default insurance cost him 11 basis points, for instance. That is, to insure $1 million of Greek government bonds against default, Hayman Capital paid a premium of $1,100 dollars a year. Bass guessed that when Greece defaulted, as it inevitably would, the country would be forced to pay down its debt by roughly 70 percent—which is to say that every $1,100 bet would return $700,000. “There’s a disbelief that a developed country can default, because we have never seen it in our lifetime,” said Bass. “And it’s not in anyone’s interest to pay attention to this. Even our own investors. They look at us and say, ‘Yeah, you got subprime right. But you’re always out there looking for these extremely rare events and so you think they happen more often than they do.’ But I didn’t go looking for this position. I was trying to understand the way the world was working, and this came to me.” Now that he understood the way the world was working, he continued, he couldn’t see how any sane person could do anything but prepare for another, bigger financial catastrophe. “It may not be the end of the world,” he said. “But a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. Our goal is not to be one of them.”

He was totally persuasive. He was also totally incredible. A guy sitting in an office in Dallas, Texas, making sweeping claims about the future of countries he’d hardly set foot in: how on earth could he know how a bunch of people he’d never met might behave? As he laid out his ideas I had an experience I’ve often had, while listening to people who seem perfectly certain about uncertain events. One part of me was swept away by his argument and began to worry the world was about to collapse; the other part suspected he might be nuts. “That’s great,” I said, but I was already thinking about the flight I needed to catch. “But even if you’re right, what can any normal person do about it?”

He stared at me as if he’d just seen an interesting sight: the world’s stupidest man.

“What do you tell your mother when she asks you where to put her money?” I asked.

“Guns and gold,” he said simply.

“Guns and gold,” I said. So he was nuts.

“But not gold futures,” he said, paying no attention to my thoughts. “You need physical gold.” He explained that when the next crisis struck, the gold futures market was likely to seize up, as there were more outstanding futures contracts than available gold. People who thought they owned gold would find they owned pieces of paper instead. He opened his desk drawer, hauled out a giant gold brick, and dropped it on the desk. “We’ve bought a lot of this stuff.”

At this point, I was giggling nervously and glancing toward the door. The future is a lot harder to predict than people on Wall