[HN Gopher] Michael Burry warns the 'mother of all crashes' is c...
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       Michael Burry warns the 'mother of all crashes' is coming
        
       Author : birriel
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2021-06-19 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (markets.businessinsider.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (markets.businessinsider.com)
        
       | meowkit wrote:
       | I like Burry, but we really need a prediction market or some sort
       | of tracker for these crash predictions. Really for "moon"
       | predictions too.
       | 
       | I've been seeing this prediction form Burry for a while.
        
       | akomtu wrote:
       | I'm not sure why crypto is even relevant here. If Bitcoin drops
       | to zero tomorrow, the economy won't budge. The real thing is the
       | moratorium on evictions expiring this month, and with about 8
       | million americans haven't been paying rent and mortgage for a
       | while, this opens interesting possibilities in July. My bet,
       | though, is that the moratorium will be extended till end of year.
        
         | ganoushoreilly wrote:
         | That coupled with the cancelation of extended un-employment
         | benefits in some states is definitely going to cause some
         | friction.
        
       | alpineidyll3 wrote:
       | Investment personalities predicting crashes is a classic PR move,
       | because if the predicted crash doesn't occur, there's no penalty.
       | If it does, the person receives universal permanent adulation.
       | 
       | Ultimately, this nonsense preys on the public's misunderstanding
       | about how markets work, and that all financial positions are
       | bets, which express a measure of certainty in an uncertain
       | outcome.
        
         | ItsMonkk wrote:
         | I see Burry as a financial pen-tester. He researches very
         | deeply into the mechanics of how the market works. He's looking
         | into the code. Once he finds a bug, he finds what effects would
         | occur if the bug occurs. Once he has found something with a big
         | enough impact, then he asks what would trigger it to occur.
         | 
         | In 2006 he found excessive margin being applied to housing. He
         | saw that the Fed was raising their rates. He knew that it was
         | inevitable that this would cause foreclosures. There were
         | massive bets bigger than anything the system could bear, and in
         | fact his bets were a piece of it. Was he early? Yes. Had he
         | been later, would he have got a bigger return? Perhaps not. It
         | was only that he was so early that no one else had a clue that
         | he was given such amazing odds.
         | 
         | Now he sees the bubble is happening because passive investing
         | into the stock market through our 401k's has driven the smart
         | money of the money into front-running that passive
         | investment[0]. He's saying the massive 30% increase in the
         | money supply after CO-VID is going straight into the stock
         | market and that flow is drying up. Every stock is now far above
         | their value, with their 'value' being their net future risk
         | adjusted returns.
         | 
         | Burry sees that this is unsustainable, and he sees that this
         | bubble is now two times of magnitude as large as any other
         | bubble ever created. When a small percentage of people pull
         | their money from the being invested in passive funds, they will
         | quickly overpower the buy pressure and the markets will drop,
         | causing others to pull until they go to 0. His expectation is
         | that once this starts to burst, the Fed is going to have no
         | other choice than to do the same exact thing they did last
         | time, and they have to react faster than last time with no way
         | to think about it. They will print beyond ever thought possible
         | or the system will fundamentally collapse. This is why he
         | mentions Weimar Republic inflation. If 2008 was the previous
         | largest bubble and that costs us 4T, two magnitude is a 400T
         | problem.
         | 
         | So he's asking what the economy will do when 400T is created in
         | the blink of en eye. He's got his money where his mouth is. And
         | particularly importantly, nothing he is saying now can affect
         | the future. Either we are the Titanic, and we already hit the
         | Iceburg, or he's wrong this time. Maybe he's early. But is he
         | wrong?
         | 
         | [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-rJciYZmi0
        
           | boldslogan wrote:
           | >>He's got his money where his mouth is.
           | 
           | Looking at his scion capital quarterly report, it seems he
           | has a lot of his portfolio in puts (40%?) then the next 30%
           | in calls then a mixed bag of stocks.
           | 
           | https://whalewisdom.com/filer/scion-asset-management-
           | llc#tab...
           | 
           | to me it seems he is more bearish on Tesla than the market?
           | So it is hard to say he is against the entire market...?
           | Judging by the gigantic position he has against them.
           | 
           | Can you clarify what you mean here? Does he have other
           | positions like puts on crypto?
        
             | ItsMonkk wrote:
             | TSLA is a growth stock, and growth stocks have done
             | extraordinarily well throughout CO-VID. To have a put on
             | TSLA is to have a bet against growth. His TLT and TBT bets
             | are the next largest piece of his portfolio and show what
             | he's thinking.
             | 
             | As for Bitcoin, he never said that it would cause a crash,
             | merely that when the stock market does go down Bitcoin will
             | go with it(because of it's reliance on leverage that will
             | get called away) and the effect will be to wipe out all the
             | kids and retail investors that have bet on it.
             | 
             | How do you profit on Bitcoin crashing? As you recall, he
             | specifically was worried in 2006 about the banks going
             | under, and Bitcoin has that problem to a much larger
             | degree. If you bet against Tether and Tether goes to 0,
             | there's a good chance all coins go to 0 and you won't be
             | able to receive your winnings. Sometimes the only winning
             | move is not to play.
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | > How do you profit on Bitcoin crashing?
               | 
               | Sell futures?
               | 
               | (I'm not GP nor really disagreeing with anything else you
               | said.)
        
         | blackoil wrote:
         | It should be easy to cite all the bad predictions he had made.
        
           | polishTar wrote:
           | Well, that'd be exhausting, but it didn't take long to find
           | that since he became a celeb-investor in late 2015 (when the
           | movie came out), he's made similar predictions including: a
           | couple weeks after the movie's release
           | (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/big-short-genius-
           | say...), in 2017 (https://www.lombardiletter.com/michael-
           | burry-stock-market-cr...), in 2019
           | (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/the-big-shorts-michael-
           | burry...), and now obviously in 2021.
           | 
           | Continually predicting the market is about to crash seems to
           | be his thing.
        
             | rkk3 wrote:
             | > Continually predicting the market is about to crash seems
             | to be his thing.
             | 
             | It's a story the press love & he has been type cast.
        
         | lake_vincent wrote:
         | Yeah, but at least he puts his money where his mouth is. His
         | fund has huge puts on treasuries, and calls on food staples.
         | Not just a PR move, his investments actually reflect his
         | prediction.
        
           | tambeb wrote:
           | >> Yeah, but at least he puts his money where his mouth is.
           | 
           | I'd argue one could also interpret this as "putting his mouth
           | where his money is."
        
             | what_ever wrote:
             | Doesn't work that because putting mouth is free, putting
             | money isn't.
        
       | rybosworld wrote:
       | Burry is addicted to predicting crashes. He managed to do pretty
       | well on predicting the global financial crisis, but his timing
       | was off by a few years. He still got famous though, and now
       | people hang on to his every word. Doesn't seem to matter that the
       | other 5 crashes he predicted never happened.
        
       | throwkeep wrote:
       | > "The problem with #Crypto, as in most things, is the leverage,"
       | he tweeted. "If you don't know how much leverage is in crypto,
       | you don't know anything about crypto."
       | 
       | Wasn't a lot this knocked out when Bitcoin crashed to $30k? How
       | much still remains?
        
         | Supermancho wrote:
         | Take a look after June 25th, 2021.
        
           | yumraj wrote:
           | why June 25th?
        
             | babyshake wrote:
             | Quarterly futures expiration. OP is predicting another
             | crash?
        
         | ac29 wrote:
         | The largest exchange, Binance, has had over $50B of futures
         | volume in the last 24 hours [0]. Futures are generally traded
         | with leverage and in crypto trading, leverage can be huge -
         | 100x is available many places.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/derivatives
        
         | AznHisoka wrote:
         | It was at 30k earlier this year. It needs to go below 10k for
         | me to consider it crashing.
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-19 23:02 UTC)