With some context provided by Gessen, HFM schools readers in the stories behind the death of Bear Stearns, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the plunging dollar, the bailouts, the Madoff scandal, and, finally, the upswing. Though it's interesting to have a personal take on the tumultuous past two years—and HFM ends the interviews when the stress finally drives him to take a semisabbatical—the decision to tell this story in an interview format is tricky and ultimately unsuccessful; the choppy transcription format distances readers from the ideas at hand, and the points lose their punch.
Fans of the original article will find this expansion compelling, but other readers curious about the factors behind the crash will do better elsewhere. View Full Version of PW. For me personally, I had a close friend whose mortgage was underwater and I wanted to get an expert opinion. On another level, I was interested in how a person with a real mastery of a field thinks about it, talks about it—what that sounds like.
I always find that interesting, when people talk about their work, and HFM was able to talk about his in a uniquely thoughtful way. Gosh, a lot of things. Some of them were from other countries, and some of them were from this country.
I knew all this in a vague way before. Now, I really know it; we all do. And that kind of belief occasionally caused him to be very unfeeling. You criminal! Like, if you picked the wrong side in many of the other countries that I operated in, you could die.
That was a great privilege to have, right? That civic culture is falling apart and the stakes are higher at the same time. HFM: I feel like the choice that we have right now—the joke that I make is like, we have a terrible case of the Berlusconis right now. Berlusconi disease. And someone is offering you like a homeopathic dose of Maoism. HFM: But that place is falling apart. They have the EU to lean on.
The bear case that people articulate is that you have a lacuna in authority and, getting back to civic culture, how we would deal, as a society, with an unprecedented situation. I think, twenty years ago, with Bush v. People were dissatisfied or satisfied with the result. Now the issue is like, wow, people feel like there are not the soft institutions that can mediate the problem. Like honestly, again, talking about degree of belief, with him? Who knows. He says all this crazy stuff, but not that much has actually changed.
When the election happened I talked with a lot of my friends who were more inconsolable about the whole thing. Like decoupling from China? Absent some small issues, that seems to be business as usual. You go Trump, it means less regulation, lower taxes, but more volatility. It kind of balances out. How are people planning for that? Are there trades that they can make? HFM: Oh, well one thing that people looked at is that you can look at the calendar of options on the equity market or on currencies, and you see, you can sort of price volatility around very narrow dates by looking at the whole calendar of options.
There are a bunch of trades where you can just try to isolate the week or the month after the election and the spike of volatility around the election. The interesting thing is that always happens, but it used to be that that volatility spike would be right on a Tuesday. Tuesday into Wednesday. Where that volatility spike is, in days, it should be further out.
There are always doom and gloomers who buy gold. HFM: Let me back up. Henry Blodget, he made this call before he was famous Henry Blodget, when he was an equity analyst.
I always look for opportunities to do these Henry Blodget calls. I mean they took Idi Amin, okay? His first visit overseas, remember , is Saudi Arabia. But if it does happen.
HFM: A media thing? If you look—you see all those amnesties fold. But the Hunter Biden thing? I think that laptop is real, I think the emails are real. It just a classic double grift. I think the suckers at the table are the people who thought they were buying influence by paying money to Hunter Biden. I think this has gone on, there are so many people who are relatives of politicians who play that game.
I think people want tourism, like in the ancient world you read accounts of people doing tourism. Tourist travel is coming back. I think even a certain amount of business travel. The dirty little secret of business travel for a lot of people is that they complain about it, but they actually like it. But the thing that is not, is how we shop.
So to me it seems very plausible that what could not come back is malls. People who slowly would move into a new pattern of behavior are shocked into the new pattern of behavior. And it may be that some percentage of the population was there against its will. Like me, I was there against my will for a while. But there are a lot of people who want to live in New York because of the things that it offers, so assuming those things are back on offer, which I think they will be, people will come back.
Is it six months, is it a year? So yeah, malls. HFM: Yeah, to buy a physical mall. You know, you talk to the cashiers, I do sort of like that one, nothing else though. HFM: Then you gotta send them back. Now we have a relationship and now I have to get out of this relationship. The car needs to be in my driveway on Monday. I wired him them the money the day before, signed some stuff, and the car was in my driveway.
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