The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [108]
One of the things he'd learned about Asperger's, since he'd discovered that he had it, was the role that his interests served. They were a safe place to which he could retreat from a hostile world. That was why people with Asperger's experienced them so intensely. That was also, oddly, why they couldn't control them. "The therapist I see helped me figure it out," he wrote in an e-mail, "and it makes a lot of sense when I look back at my own life:
Let me see if I can get it right--it always sounds better when the therapist says it. Well, if you start with a person who has tremendous difficulty integrating himself into the social workings of society, and often feels misunderstood, slighted, and lonely as a result, you will see where an intense interest can be something that builds up the ego in the classical sense. Asperger's kids can apply tremendous focus and ramp up knowledge of a subject in which they have an interest very quickly, often well beyond the level of any peers. That ego-reinforcement is very soothing, providing something that Asperger's kids just do not experience often, if at all. As long as the interest provides that reinforcement, there is little danger of a change. But when the interest encounters a rocky patch, or the person experiences failure in the interest, the negativity can be felt very intensely, especially when it comes from other people. The interest in such a case can simply start to mimic all that the Asperger's person was trying to escape--the apparent persecution, the misunderstanding, the exclusion by others. And the person with Asperger's would have to find another interest to build up and maintain the ego.
Most of 2006 and early 2007 Dr. Michael Burry had experienced as a private nightmare. In an e-mail, he wrote, "The partners closest to me tend to ultimately hate me.... This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is, I haven't identified what it kills. But it is something vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it." As his interest in financial markets seeped out of him, he bought his first guitar. It was strange: He couldn't play the guitar and had no talent for it. He didn't even want to play the guitar. He just needed to learn all about the sorts of wood used to make guitars, and to buy guitars and tubes and amps. He just needed to...know everything there was to know about guitars.
He'd picked an intelligent moment for the death of his interest. It was the moment at which the end was written: the moment at which there was nothing left to prevent. Six months from that moment, the International Monetary Fund would put losses on U.S.-originated subprime-related assets at a trillion dollars. One trillion dollars in losses had been created by American financiers, out of whole cloth, and embedded in the American financial system. Each Wall Street firm held some share of those losses, and could do nothing to avoid them. No Wall Street firm would be able to extricate itself, as there were no longer any buyers. It was as if bombs of differing sizes had been placed in virtually every major Western financial institution. The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.
CHAPTER TEN
Two Men in a Boat
Virtually no one--be they homeowners, financial institutions, rating agencies, regulators, or investors--anticipated what is occurring.
--Deven Sharma, president of S&P Testimony before U.S. House of Representatives October 22, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system...Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. "The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found" in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan's Cattolica University.