The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Joe Cassano heads AIG’s Financial Products division (AIG FP), which provides the credit default swaps Eisman is buying. Cassano is widely considered an autocrat obsessed with stamping out dissent; his staff soft-pedals their reports to him, lest he fly into a rage. Theirs is “a boss with an imperfect understanding of the nuances of his own business, and whose judgment was clouded by his insecurity” (88).

AIG’s Gene Park looks into the subprime mortgage bond market and is stunned: “It was simply a bet that home prices would never fall” (89). He convinces Cassano, and AIG FP stops selling insurance on the bonds “but did nothing to offset the 50 billion dollars’ worth that it had already sold” (90).

When Lippmann meets with Eisman, he learns that Eisman has already sold short the companies Lippmann wants to warn him about. Eisman’s assistants, Vinny Daniel and Danny Moses, interview Lippmann, who talks rapidly and, despite his compelling information, causes suspicion: “The story rang true even as the narrator seemed entirely unreliable” (92). Eisman’s team puts off working with Lippmann.

Housing analyst Ivy Zelman informs Eisman that the ratio of house prices to income has risen from its historical average of 3:1 up to 4:1 in 2004.