A thought provoking article about a bet on American Malls heading towards a crash.
It's a good thing I didn't just blindly close the hundreds of tabs that I have open because I just read this beautiful, amazing and thought-provoking piece by Esquire (which has some amazing long reads BTW) on a wall street hedge fund betting that american shopping malls were going towards a crash . It was amazing and fun to read but at the same time there's a deeper and sadder issue of the impact this has on the people. I'm not talking about the people impact of the bet itself but the fact that a bet can be made in the first place. Two paragraphs nicely sum up the issue. “A well-documented historical pattern is that fraud thrives in boom periods and is revealed in busts,” the university researchers wrote, adding that end investors were unaware of this hidden risk, a deception akin to buying a Ferrari secretly outfitted with a rusted-out Kia engine. It could be argued that CMBS had been a magic trick all along, with big banks one step ahead, luring investors to pick a c