Quotation

The Big Short

Inside the Doomsday Machine
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Up to that point, Hubler’s bet had been “stress tested” for scenarios in which subprime pools experienced losses of 6 percent, the highest losses from recent history. Now Hubler’s traders were asked to imagine what would become of their bet if losses reached 10 percent. The demand came directly from Morgan Stanley’s chief risk officer, Tom Daula, and Hubler and his traders were angered and disturbed that he would issue it. “It was more than a little weird,” says one of them. “There was a lot of angst about it. It was sort of viewed as, These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people.” (Losses in the pools Hubler’s group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.) As a senior Morgan Stanley executive outside Hubler’s group put it, “They didn’t want to show you the results. They kept saying, That state of the world can’t happen.”