Contrarians have the good sense not to buy into the herd mentality and happy talk politicians and their sycophants like to peddle about how good things are and how the future is bound to be even better than the past or present moment. Contrarians are the ones with the courage to say the emperor has no clothes. Or put another way, for those who enjoy anonymous but perhaps Sufi in origin wisdom: “A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future.”
In all likelihood, you may never have heard of Kyle Bass. He’s a Texas investor, which in itself is no big deal. What sets Bass apart, according to author Michael Lewis, is how he made millions of dollars through his Dallas hedge fund Hayman Capital, as one of only 15 people to bet against the U.S. sub-prime mortgage bond market in 2008 – before Bass turned to betting on the collapse of entire sovereign national economies in Europe, such as Greece. These days he’s talking about the European sovereign-debt crisis and his expectations regarding the economic future of Japan and Argentina.
While Bass could read a spreadsheet well enough to see what others didn’t and start betting against Europe in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, he’s not much for foreign travel himself, preferring to shoot beavers on his Texas ranch from his army jeep with a sniper rifle. He also has a warehouse full of gold bars, along with some extra gold bullion in his desk drawer, as well as 20 million U.S. nickels he holds after buying them at face value for $1 million when the nickel inside each coin was worth 6.8 cents.
Michael Lewis is, of course, something of a contrarian himself. A prolific business writer whose work often appears in Vanity Fair magazine, he first came to public notice in 1989 when he left behind the life of a Salomon Brothers’ bond salesman on Wall Street after five years to write the semi-autobiographical Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street. Along with Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities novel published two years earlier, Liar’s Poker became the definitive take on Wall Street greed in the junk bond era of the 1980s.
If you want to understand how ordinary Greeks and successive national governments – in a twist on the usual story – wound up sinking the essentially honest Greek banks, or why fishermen in Iceland suddenly decided to become international investment bankers, or how the Irish thought they could get rich and stay rich by doing little more than building newer and bigger homes for each other, as the Irish banks aided and abetted nouveau property developers at every turn, you may want to read Lewis’s book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, published in 2011.
Contrarians remind us that most of us don’t need much help in pulling the wool over our eyes. We’re more than willing – even eager ofttimes – to do it ourselves.
soundingsjohnbarker 