The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [8]
He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money. They were giant black boxes, whose hidden gears were in constant motion. Several months into the audit, Vinny's manager grew tired of his questions. "He couldn't explain it to me. He said, 'Vinny, it's not your job. I hired you to do XYZ, do XYZ and shut your mouth.' I walked out of his office and said, 'I gotta get out of here.'"
Vinny went looking for another job. An old school friend of his worked at a place called Oppenheimer and Co. and was making good money. He handed Vinny's resume in to human resources, and it made its way to Steve Eisman, who turned out to be looking for someone to help him parse the increasingly arcane accounting used by subprime mortgage originators. "I can't add," says Eisman. "I think in stories. I need help with numbers." Vinny heard that Eisman could be difficult and was surprised that, when they met, Eisman seemed interested only in whether they'd be able to get along. "He seemed to be just looking for a good egg," says Vinny. They'd met twice when Eisman phoned him out of the blue. Vinny assumed he was about to be offered a job, but soon after they started to talk, Eisman received an emergency call on the other line and put Vinny on hold. Vinny sat waiting for fifteen minutes in silence, but Eisman never came back on the line.
Two months later, Eisman called him back. When could Vinny start?
Eisman didn't particularly recall why he had put Vinny on hold and never picked up again, any more than he recalled why he had gone to the bathroom in the middle of lunch with a big-time CEO and never returned. Vinny soon found his own explanation: When he'd picked up the other line, Eisman had been informed that his first child, a newborn son named Max, had died. Valerie, sick with the flu, had been awakened by a night nurse, who informed her that she, the night nurse, had rolled on top of the baby in her sleep and smothered him. A decade later, the people closest to Eisman would describe this as an event that changed his relationship to the world around him. "Steven always thought he had an angel on his shoulder," said Valerie. "Nothing bad ever happened to Steven. He was protected and he was safe. After Max, the angel on his shoulder was done. Anything can happen to anyone at any time." From that moment, she noticed many changes in her husband, large and small, and Eisman did not disagree. "From the point of view of the history of the universe, Max's death was not a big deal," said Eisman. "It was just my big deal."
At any rate, Vinny and Eisman never talked about what had happened. All Vinny knew was that the Eisman he went to work for was obviously not quite the same Eisman he'd met several months earlier. The Eisman Vinny had interviewed with was, by the standards of Wall Street analysts, honest. He was not completely uncooperative. Oppenheimer was among the leading bankers to the subprime mortgage industry. They never would have been given the banking business if Eisman, their noisiest analyst, had not been willing to say nice things about them. Much as he enjoyed bashing the less viable companies, he accepted that the subprime lending industry was a useful addition to the U.S. economy. His willingness to be rude about a few of