The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [13]
By the spring of 2004 he was in a state. He hadn't raised money; he didn't know that he would; he didn't even know if he could. He certainly didn't believe that the world was fair, or that things always worked out for the best, or that he enjoyed some special protection from life's accidents. He was waking up at four in the morning, drenched in sweat. He was also in therapy. He was still Eisman, however, and so it wasn't conventional therapy. "Work group," it was called. A handful of professionals gathered with a trained psychotherapist to share their problems in a safe environment. Eisman would burst in late to these meetings, talk through whatever was bothering him, and then rush off before the others had a chance to tell him about their problems. After he'd done this a couple of times, the therapist said something to him about it, but he didn't appear to have heard her. So she took to calling Eisman's wife, whom she knew, to ask her to have a word with her husband. That didn't work either. "I always knew when he'd been to group," said Valerie, "because she'd call and say, 'He did it again!'"
Valerie was clearly weary of the rat race. She told Eisman that if this latest Wall Street venture didn't work out, they would leave New York for Rhode Island and open a bed-and-breakfast. Valerie had scouted places and spoke often about spending more time with the twins she'd given birth to, and even raising chickens. It was almost as hard for Eisman to imagine himself raising chickens as it was for people who knew him, but he'd agreed. "The idea of it was so unbelievably unappealing to him," says his wife, "that he started to work harder." Eisman traveled all over Europe and the United States searching for people willing to invest with him and found exactly one: an insurance company, which staked him to $50 million. It wasn't enough to create a sustainable equity fund, but it was a start.
Instead of money, Eisman attracted people, whose views of the world were as shaded as his own. Vinny, who had just coauthored a gloomy report called "A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt," came right away. Porter Collins, a two-time Olympic oars-man who had worked with Eisman at Chilton Investment and never really understood why the guy with the bright ideas wasn't given more authority, came along too. Danny Moses, who became Eisman's head trader, came third. Danny had worked as a salesman at Oppenheimer and Co. and had pungent memories of Eisman doing and saying all sorts of things that sell-side analysts seldom did. In the middle of one trading day, for instance, Eisman had walked to the podium at the center of the Oppenheimer trading floor, called for everyone's attention, announced that "the following eight stocks are going to zero," and then listed eight companies that indeed went bankrupt. Raised in Georgia, the son of a finance professor, Danny was less openly fatalistic than Vinny or Steve, but he nevertheless shared a general sense that bad things can and do happen, especially on Wall Street. When a Wall Street firm helped him to get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, he asked the salesman, "I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?"
Heh-heh-heh, c'mon, we'd never do that, the trader started to say, but Danny, though perfectly polite, was insistent.
We both know that unadulterated good things like this trade don't just happen between little hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I'll do it, but only after you explain to me how you are going to fuck me. And the salesman explained how he was going to fuck him. And Danny did the trade.
All of them enjoyed, immensely, the