How does one get a Harvard Business School case study made after them? Why by being constantly ahead of the curve, with the right trade, and being mocked by the same "access journalism and excel free" mainstream media which pushed subprime toxic grenades to anyone who listened, only to be proven correct time after time. In other words, by being Kyle Bass: the same Kyle Bass who lost money month after month on his Subprime short (full slide deck here [9]), only to see it all made back, and then some... quite a bit of some. Because it is not by following the herd that one makes the killer trades: it is by standing against it and by waiting for conventional wisdom (in this case that Japan's debt load is somehow sustainable - it isn't, but the kneejerk response still is one to treat JGB's as a flight to safety - this only works until it no longer does and the same math that had doomed the euro over a decade ago is finally grasped by all). Yes: he has lost 60% on his Japanese short fund [10]since inception: so what? All it takes is one millisecond of Malcom Gladwellian insight and the formerly offerless market goes bidless. And that -60% is transformed to +XXXX.YY. Perhaps once the market takes long, hard look at the underlying reality of what the chart below implies, and that unlike in the US, where two-thirds of all financial liabilities are mopped up by the shadow banking system which provides an unregulated inflation buffer (there is a reason why the European bank system is 3x bigger than the US - the balance is made up of the 100% unregulated shadow banking liabilities most of which are held off the books!), Japan just does not have one.
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(As a total tangent, we are always fascinated when "pundits" come up with "economic" theories explaining what they have absolutely no understanding of: namely the subversive role of shadow banking with its $20 trillion in assets which allows infinite asset rehypothecation, which more than any other three letter economic theory that has no bearing in practical reality, is the sole reason why Treasurys are a Giffen good... for now.)
Either way, below is the complete Harvard Business School presentation on Kyle Bass, on Heyman Capital and on the Japan Short ber, which we hope will put to rest some of the prevalent disinformation floating around.