How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Eisman wasn't just a little cynical. He held a picture of the financial world in his head that was radically different from [...] the financial world's self-portrait. (1.35)
Although Eisman has always viewed the financial world with a mixture of distrust and disdain, the things he learns over the course of The Big Short shock him. If anything, the dude's problem was not being cynical enough. That's a crazy thought, especially after you get to know Eisman.
Quote #2
Steve Eisman was odd in his conviction that the leveraging of middle-class America was a corrupt and corrupting event. (5.4)
Of all of the people who bet against the subprime market, Eisman is the most driven by personal political beliefs. He has an almost socialistic disdain for the way that the upper classes exploit the lower classes, and nowhere does he see this happening more than in the subprime market.
Quote #3
[Eisman] saw himself as a crusader, a champion of the underdog, and enemy of sinister authority. He saw himself, roughly speaking, as Spider-Man. (6.35)
Eisman's obsession with comic books—and specifically Spider-Man—reveals a whole new aspect of his personality. It's almost adorable. What's more, it ties in nicely with his obsession with fighting injustice, placing him in a long line of rich dudes who play superhero, from Bruce Wayne to Tony Stark.
Quote #4
He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him. [...] A society with deep, troubling economic problem had rigged itself to disguise those problems (6.45)
Going to the big subprime mortgage conference in Vegas is like entering the belly of the beast. It's bad enough knowing that the big banks are ripping off working-class Americans, but how is Eisman supposed to handle how much joy these people seem to be taking from doing so? Unfortunately, these people don't care too much about consequences—they just care about scoring a monster bonus.
Quote #5
"That was the moment when we said, "Holy s***, this isn't just credit. This is a fictitious Ponzi scheme." (6.50)
The existence of the "synthetic CDO" changes the game entirely. Whenever Eisman and company bet against a subprime bond, the banks take those bets, bundle them together, and turn them into new bonds. It's like betting against another person's bet. It's also extremely manipulative.
Quote #6
In Vegas, the question [...] ceased to be, Do these bond market people know something we do not? It was replaced by, Do they deserve merely to be fired, or should they be put in jail? (6.50)
At first, the guys at FrontPoint Partners think that the subprime market is just manipulative and unethical. As they learn more, however, they start realizing that this stuff might be illegal. When you put everything together—the exploitative mortgage loans, the blind eye turned by the ratings agencies, the rise of the synthetic CDO—the result is a criminally unjust system.
Quote #7
"Either the game was totally rigged, or we had gone totally f***ing crazy. The fraud was so obvious that it seemed to us it had implications for democracy. We actually got scared." (7.11)
To make things worse, mortgage bonds continue to retain their value even after the mortgages they contain start going bad. How much sense does that make? Spoiler alert: none. As Charlie notes here, this sort of fraud and injustice doesn't just affect the financial world, but it also wraps back around and impacts the country's political system.
Quote #8
"But they didn't know a thing about CDOs, or asset-back securities. We took them through our trade but I'm pretty sure they didn't understand it." (7.11)
Government regulators aren't portrayed so much as corrupt as just plain inept in The Big Short. Remember: the subprime mortgage bond market is a relatively recent phenomenon. Because of this, the SEC is woefully unprepared to oversee it, which allows the situation to balloon into a legit international disaster.
Quote #9
"You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience." (10.25)
Ouch. Eisman doesn't say this part when he presents his speech to Deutsche Bank's investors, but he really wishes he did. Either way, now that the chickens are coming home to roost for the big banks, Eisman can finally expose them as the fraudsters that they are.
Quote #10
In early October 2008, [...] the U.S. government had stepped in to say it would, in effect, absorb all the losses in the financial system and prevent any big Wall Street firm from failing. (10.61)
This isn't the justice Steve Eisman was looking for. Although in real life Eisman has come out in support of the U.S. government's decision to keep the banks together, arguing that it was the only way the financial market could survive, it's hard to imagine that he sees this as an actual happy ending. Where are the bailouts for the regular people working 9-5 and barely scraping by?