When 32-year-old Michael Burry “spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn’t surprised that no one understood what he was doing.” This is an excerpt from The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis: “A bond backed entirely by subprime mortgages, for example, wasn’t called a subprime-mortgage bond. It was called an ‘A.B.S.,’ or ‘asset-backed security.’ If you asked Deutsche Bank exactly what assets secured an asset-backed security, you’d be handed lists of more acronyms—R.M.B.S., hels, helocs, Alt-A—along with categories of credit you did not know existed (‘midprime’). R.M.B.S. stood for ‘residential-mortgage-backed security.’ hel stood for ‘home-equity loan.’ heloc stood for ‘home-equity line of credit.’ Alt-A was just what they called crappy subprime-mortgage loans for which they hadn’t even bothered to acquire the proper documents—to, say, verify the borrower’s income. All of this could more clearly be called ‘subprime loans,’ but the bond market wasn’t clear. ‘Midprime’ was a kind of triumph of language over truth.”