Money Failed!: Death bets, Paramount and Archegos
2024-05-03 00:42:45
<p>The audio companion to Bloomberg Opinion’s beloved Money Stuff column hosted by its author Matt Levine, “whose deadpan style mixes technical elucidation and wit” (NY Times). Once a week, Matt and his friend, Bloomberg News reporter and TV host Katie Greifeld, talk about Wall Street, finance and…other stuff. New episodes every Friday.</p>
I'm Maria Konnikova, and I'm Nate Silver, and our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election too.
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast, where we talk about stuff related to money.
I'm Matt Levine. I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.
And I'm Katie Greithald, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
What do we got today, Katie?
Death bets.
Death bets.
We're going to talk about Apollo, and we're going to talk about a really interesting asset class.
Death. Death. The final asset class.
We're also going to talk about a messy merger. We're talking about Paramount and Sherry Redstone and what is going to happen there.
And we're going to talk about Bill Wang and Archegos and how money failed him.
Money failed.
And we might talk about reader mail.
We have a lot of it.
We have a certain amount of reader mail.
Death bets. Specifically, you said that Apollo had some death bets. Really interesting case. I'm going to need you to just give us a quick summary here.
So you can buy life insurance. If you buy life insurance, you can sell that life insurance. If you have like a 20-year life insurance policy and after five years you're like, I don't need this life insurance policy anymore, there are investors who will buy it from you. One of the biggest investors that owns these policies is Apollo, or it's funds run by Apollo. And when you do this, then they take over the policy.
And then, if you die, they get the money. But the estate, the son, I think of a woman who died while Apollo owned her life insurance policy, sued Apollo, saying, you shouldn't get that money. And he actually won. And now he's suing Apollo some more.
Which is crazy. We're going to get into the specifics.
All the bits of it are crazy.
I love that case. I have to say before you even wrote about this, because I think the original story was from April 26th and there were immediately so many memes on Twitter about, like how this is the perfect money stuff story. There was a meme of Matt Levine reading this headline and it was like this cartoon guy, like being reanimated. I really enjoyed it. And then you did write about it.
I did write about it. There is a sense in which it is not news. This is a trade that happened in 2006.. The woman died several years ago. The lawsuit, they won against Apollo last year, but it dribbled up into consciousness this week when they filed this other lawsuit.
And although it is not very newsy, it is very money stuffy.
It is very money stuff. And I'm going to need you to just explain to me what they're alleging that Apollo did wrong here. Because, as you lay out in your column, you can sell your life insurance policy. If you have one, you can sell it. And it seems like that is somewhat common.
Somewhat common. It's common. It's a very small fraction of the life insurance market, but it does happen a lot. So they're actually not saying Apollo did anything wrong, weirdly. I mean, they are because, like they're trying to be inflammatory.
But what happened here is that for a long time, you could sell your life insurance policies. And at some point in the early 2000s, people realized, hey, this could be a big business. So they started funds. So they'd raise money from investors, saying, we're going to go buy all these life insurance policies from people. And they raised all this money.
and then they're like, oh, we got to go find all this life insurance. It's actually not that easy. Because all these people have life insurance and they don't want to keep paying the premiums. It's hard to find them. Like they don't know that there's a secondary market where they can sell their life insurance.
And so what happened in the early to mid 2000s is that there was a boom in insurance brokers saying, wait a minute, there's all these investors looking to buy life insurance policies. I'm trying to sell life insurance policies to people. There's a trade here where I sell a $5 million life insurance policy to, like an older person. I get my commission for selling the life insurance policy. She turns around and immediately sells the policy to an investor and she gets cash for selling the policy.
I get cash for originating the policy and the investors get life insurance policies that they want to invest in. So this became a big business in like the early mid 2000s. And it's called STOLI, which is Stranger Originated Life Insurance. And so this policy came into being. like an insurance agent went to this woman and said, Hey, I've got a trade for you.
You can get paid $150,000 to sign your name to some papers and then I'll sell the life insurance to investors. The investors were not Apollo. Apollo, like several years later, bought this policy in a big pool of policies from other investors. So Apollo didn't have anything to do with the apparently illegal origination of this policy, because it turns out that if you're a person and you take out life insurance and you then change your mind years later and decide to sell it, you can do that. There's a secondary market.
It's sometimes controversial, but basically it works and it's legal. But if you do this, if you do the thing where you just take out a policy planning from day one to sell it to investors and you're not paying the premium, the investors are sponsoring the premium from day one, then that doesn't work.
Why not? Is it just because the insurance company doesn't like that?
Insurance companies don't like it. And so like states regulated, I don't have a good answer to why not, but the rough answer is that insurance is supposed to be insurance. You're supposed to be buying it for what they call insurance purposes, which is this kind of vague term, but it means like you're trying to protect your family. If you die, you're trying to do some estate planning. You have some sort of personal reason for buying the insurance.
If you're just doing it as a bet on your mortality, then it's frowned upon.
And this trade where it's just an investor buying life insurance for you is just a pure bet on your mortality. And so they don't like it. It's kind of illegal, by which I mean, not that you go to jail necessarily, but the result here is that the investors bought this policy for this woman. They gave her money. They paid her like $150,000 to sign the papers and do this thing.
They paid all the premiums on the policy for her entire life. And then she died and the policy paid out $5 million and the investors were like, okay, that's the insurance we paid for. And her estate was like, no, no, we get that money because you weren't allowed to do this in the first place. And it turns out the estate is right. And so the estate gets the money.
She got paid to take out the insurance and then she got the proceeds of the insurance. It seems kind of unfair.
I have two points to make here. The first being on like why insurance companies don't like this. I mean, you make the point that this is an insurance product. It's not necessarily supposed to be financialized in the way that it has been. But I was talking to someone in the insurance industry, and they also said that these insurance companies count on.
there's going to be a certain percentage of people who let their life insurance lapse like they're not going to pay the premiums. They can't keep up with it. And then obviously they don't have to pay it out, the insurance company. And this whole model that we're talking about removes that.
Yeah, that's exactly right. That's sort of what it means to say it shouldn't be financialized. Like the insurance companies sell you the insurance, understanding that you're a person and, like your circumstances can change. You might forget to pay the premiums. You might not be able to afford to pay the premiums.
You might decide, actually, I don't need this life insurance anymore because my kids grew up or whatever. And if you do that, you will stop paying the premiums. And so they can price that and the insurance is cheaper because they know some people won't pay the premiums and will then die and won't get the death benefit. But if you sell your insurance to a financial investor, the financial investor is just going to make a rational calculation about what the expected value of the policy is. And they're going to keep paying the premiums as long as it has positive expected value.
And so the insurance company is underpricing its insurance. That's why this trade worked, because you could go to all these people and buy underpriced insurance because the insurance companies were pricing it, expecting the policies would lapse, but they didn't know or they didn't think about the fact that they were selling it to financial investors.
I have to say, from the investor's point of view, seems like a great trade. I mean, you're thinking about uncorrelated returns. How much more uncorrelated can you get?
That's how this worked. People were like, realize that this was a asset class, that first of all, there's tons of life insurance out there. And secondly, it's uncorrelated. And so it's a great product to pitch to investors. I will say that my understanding is that the size of the market is limited by the fact that a lot of investors, a lot of investors everywhere, but particularly in the United States, find this gross.
They're like, I don't want to buy a life insurance. I don't want to grow up. Yeah, well, the reason I use the word death bets is because like, it's funny. Well, yeah, because it's funny, but also because the estate suing Apollo. in their complaint, they had a lot of rhetoric about how Apollo is secretly betting on people's deaths and people don't know who has an incentive to have them dead.
And it's like, this is true. The reason for a lot of these like rules is it's called the insurable interest treatment. It's like, you can only take out insurance on someone who you have some connection to, you have some incentive, you have some reason to want them to stay alive, right? So you're going to have insurance on your parents because, like, hopefully you're not going to kill your parents, right? Um, you can have insurance on your employee because, like you, care about your employee's production, right?
And if your employee dies, you'll be sad and the insurance will compensate you for that. But you can't have insurance on a stranger, because if you go and try to take out insurance on a stranger, why are you doing that? Is it because you're trying to kill them? The insurance law is really based in part in like not creating incentives to murder people. And, as one investor pointed out, there are no cases, no cases we know of, of financial investors killing the insureds on their contracts to get the payout.
There are many cases of husbands, wives, children killing their loved ones to get insurance payouts. So like, really, this is not that gross at all, right? Yeah. This is like, sure, they're betting on deaths, but they're like more moral than the sort of tail end of the spouse distribution.
I was wondering how quickly we would get to the fact that this does create incentive for.
murder. I mean, when I wrote about it, I think I got to it immediately. It's the most brilliant thing about insurance.
I mean, I have the entire column in front of me. And yeah, you're right. Murder did get brought up pretty quickly.
How could you not think about murder when you think about life insurance?
Let's talk a little bit, though, about this actual case, her name. I feel like we've referenced her a few different times. Martha Barotts, I hope I'm saying it correctly. She died in 2018.. Like you said, the estate wants the payout back.
They got it. And I don't know, is that entirely fair? Because Martha knew what she was doing.
Martha knew what she was doing. Yeah. She never paid a penny for this insurance. She got paid to fill out the forms. And then, when she died, her children were like, hey, we'd like the money.
I would think that if you decide that this policy is invalid because it was like a bad, evil betting on lives, it didn't have an insurable interest, whatever, I would think that you would say, well, then, the insurance company doesn't have to pay. But in fact, the law seems to be that if the insurance company pays, the estate can get it back rather than giving it to the investors because they want. basically, the law wants to punish the investors so that the investors don't do this.
One more point on investing. One of the stupid thoughts I had while reading this and thinking about this was to the point that this has become an asset class. I feel like just the evolution of markets is that somehow this is going to be an investable asset class on. Robinhood. Retail will be involved and it'll trade 24, seven.
So there, I would worry more about murder.
Oh, my God.
Because it's like, there's a limited number of investors in this asset class. They're all institutional. They have careers. They don't want to go to jail. They care about the reputation of the asset class and they're doing it in scale so that, like murdering one person, wouldn't change the returns that much.
It'd have to be totally blind.
If you invested in a big pool, then you wouldn't have much incentive to go. Well, you'd want to diversify, but unless you're planning to do murder, then you wouldn't want to diversify.
Well, I feel like that'd be easy to track. Like who just has some really concentrated portfolio.
A lot of insider trading is pretty easy to track and people do it anyway. So, like if you had a lot of this, you'd have at least one murder, I think.
I think it'd be a really interesting psychological and market structure experiment. So maybe someone will do it.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high stakes poker to personal.
questions.
Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's talk about a messy merger, potentially. Tricky, messy. I don't know. What word do you want to use?
Something's going on. It's a classic boardroom battle. Oh, that's a good one. Why don't you tell us what the merger is?
We're talking about Paramount and the fact that it's in exclusive conversations with Skydance, which is owned by David Ellison. But there's a lot of investors who would like them to consider also a deal coming from Apollo and Sony as well. So that's one tricky element. Then the other tricky element is, of course, Sherry Redstone, who owns 77% of the Class A shares, which is what Skydance is after. And then you have the vast majority of outstanding shares or Class B shares that have no voting power.
Yeah. So it's like this weird situation where Paramount is a big company with a lot of shares outstanding, most of which don't vote. And so, basically, Sherry Redstone controls about 5% of the stock, but that 5% of the stock has 77% of the voting power, which means that if you buy her 5% stake, you control the company, which creates a lot of incentives for mischief. The other weird thing is that Sherry Redstone doesn't actually own that stock. What she owns is a company called National Amusements.
National Amusements is a chain of movie theaters that also owns this 5%-.
124 theaters. 124 theaters.
But they also own this chunk of Class A voting stock in Paramount. That company controls Paramount and Sherry Redstone controls that company. And so if you want to buy Paramount, one thing you could do is you can go to the board of directors and say, we'll pay $12 a share in cash for all the shares of Paramount in a merger. And that's kind of more or less what Apollo seems to have offered. The other thing you can do is you go to Sherry Redstone and say, Hey, we'll take National Amusements off your hands for like $2 billion, which is like a fraction of the price of Paramount.
Paramount's equity value is something like $12 billion. This is what people seem to be talking about. If you could pay $2 billion for National Amusements and then you control Paramount and then you can do what you want. And I don't know what they want, but the deal structure is very complicated. Basically, Skydance wants to buy National Amusements and then have Paramount buy Skydance for stock and then put their own people in charge of Paramount.
And they're like, this is going to make Paramount be worth $30 a share, but it's like a complicated merger structure. But step one of the structure is we're going to buy National Amusements and then we'll control Paramount.
So that was a gorgeous explanation. I don't know why I had to try. So that's very tricky. And I have to say the disparity, the discrepancy in pricing between the class A and the class B is interesting. I mean, there's just a wide gap there.
There's lots of companies that have dual class shares, but it's often like a founder company where, like Mark Zuckerberg, isn't going to sell Facebook, right? But, like here, you really can buy control of a $12 billion company by buying 5% of the stock. And it's like just an unusually sharp case of the difference in the value of the two types of shares.
So that's tricky. That's one of the messy things. The other messy thing, they fired the CEO. Now it's a CEO committee run by-.
It's the office of CEO, right? It's like three guys. Yeah. Yeah. I was looking at the announcement.
The office of the CEO is working with the board to develop a comprehensive long range plan to accelerate growth and develop popular content. But you know, they don't mean that, right? You don't install three guys as your office of CEO. if you're planning to like, have them run the company for 10 years and develop new content, right? That's like, we are selling this company in the next two weeks.
We don't really care. he's running it for like two weeks, right?
Yeah. Yeah. As Bloomberg Intelligence put it, the replacement of Bob Backish puts Paramount a step closer to a deal with Skydance Media. Backish obviously opposed the acquisition. It feels like there's a lot of people who vocally oppose this.
Yeah. Well, so shareholders, some shareholders oppose it. Backish seems to oppose it. Several directors stepped down last month because they seem to be not super comfortable with the deal. One person who really opposes it is Mary Gabelli, who runs Gam, who's the biggest holder of class A shares other than national amusements.
He's in this weird position where, like he, has these shares that are, like, theoretically worth more than the class B shares, except that, like Skydance, doesn't have to go buy up all the class A shares. They don't have to pay a premium for the class A shares. All they have to do is buy national amusements and then they get a majority of the vote and they're done. So they don't have to pay him any premium, right? They don't have to pay the other class A holders a premium.
They just have to pay Shari Redstone for national amusements. So he's in this weird position where he's like, I think I have these super voting valuable shares, but actually they turn out not to be that valuable because they're a minority.
I mean, where does this go from here? Is this like a done deal? Is there any way that some of these vocal people who don't like this deal could actually stop it?
Oh yeah. I mean, you can't literally buy the 77% voting stock, fire the board and say, okay, we're like taking over this company and we're not going to give the public shareholders anything. There's a special committee of paramount directors who have to approve any transaction. Now it's tricky because they don't have to approve any national amusements transaction. They don't run national amusements.
The class A shares don't have to change hands, right? Like national amusements, which is its own company, could just be acquired. And then national amusements can come into the board meeting and say, okay, we're still, we still have our 77% control. Nothing has changed, except who owns national amusements. It's also tricky because the special committee and thinking about paramount, will think about how much value did Shari Redstone get for her class A shares?
How much value are the other shareholders getting for their class B shares? But they don't know how much value she's getting for her class A shares. because Skydance will presumably write her a check for national amusements. And you know, her class A shares have a market value of $700 million. And the check for national amusements is like, supposedly the reporting is like going to be around $2 billion.
So that's a big premium, but there's all those movie theaters. We don't know how much they're worth, right?
All 124 of them.
You can make, like AMC, Meme Stock, like maybe movie theater companies are really valuable, right? Maybe they're paying her the 2 billion for the movie theaters. So, like, the special committee of the board has the job of making sure that whatever deal is done for paramount is fair to the class B shareholders, to, like the regular public shareholders. And so one thing it can do is say no to any acquisition of Skydance, for instance, that it thinks is not fair to shareholders, but what it can't do is like say to Shari Redstone, you have to sell to the person we pick, right? If they like the Apollo deal and she doesn't like, they can't make her sell.
And she can block the Apollo deal because she has 77% of the vote. So it seems like there's going to be a deal because they have no CEO. And it seems like any deal would have to be one that's acceptable to Shari Redstone. You have to thread this needle of like, whoever's going to buy the company has to give Shari Redstone enough that she wants to take the deal. But it also has to be fair enough to the public shareholders that the special committee agrees to take the deal.
And, by the way, there's history here before it was paramount, like the predecessor, ViacomCBS was also the structure where Shari Redstone owned a majority of this voting stock through national amusements. And at some point the board of ViacomCBS tried to take away her voting rights or like, make it so that all the shares were voting to. like, block her from doing some merger that they thought was bad. Didn't work. They got in a lot of trouble for it, but they were like, we can't have this dynamic where, like, there's one shareholder who has a minority of the economic interest, but who has a controlling voting stake and who can, like, just force through a merger.
that we think is unfair to the shareholders. So they tried to take away her super voting rights. Didn't work. Now, here they are.
I crave that kind of power.
Which kind of power? The super voting rights or the board trying to take away the super voting rights? I know it's good. It's really, it's so unusual. Yeah.
It's so unusual. Like it's not that unusual to have super voting rights, but, like usually, people try to not have so little of the economics and have so much of the voting rights.
It just sort of looks weird.
Many of the companies that you talk about it a lot, the founders are still around. They're still running things. You know, you think about like Facebook, they're huge companies are unlikely to sell. Right. Like.
here, it's like, Shari Redstone is an heir to, like, the sort of mogul who ran it. She's interested in, in cashing out, you know, usually the super voting shares, people are like, that's designed to keep control with the people who care the most about the company, even if they have a minority economic interest. But here that's not what it's doing. here. It's like just the cash benefit for someone who wants to get rid of the company.
What I find amusing about this episode is that we're all so interested in sort of the theater and the drama of what this merger is actually going to be that there hasn't, at least in my circles, been a lot of discussion on, okay, but what about the future of Paramount? What about the actual business? Because they're in a very tough industry. And it's funny that they reported earnings this week, Paramount did, and it was a total non-event. It was a complete afterthought.
The actual numbers, the stock is not going to trade on earnings, right? If you look at like the two bids, like it's unclear, like what businesses stay, what businesses go, like, it's in a bit of a limbo about what it's actual going forward business is going to be.
I'm Maria Konnikova and I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high stakes poker to personal questions, like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And, of course, we'll be talking about the election too.
Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaking of ViacomCBS, Bill Hwang, what was that transition?
Arcego's.
Okay.
One of their positions was ViacomCBS.
It was ViacomCBS. That's right. That's what brought him down. Jeez, Louise.
I had forgotten about this. I made a gorgeous.
That was a great transition. I am sorry. It's fine. Bill Hwang, brought down by ViacomCBS.
Go on.
Bill Hwang. He's a guy. He's a former Tiger Cub hedge fund manager who then left hedge fund managing after an insider trading incident and then ran his own family office called Arcego's Capital Management. That briefly became like a $30 billion portfolio because he bought like 12 stocks, one of which was ViacomCBS. He bought them with like huge amounts of margin borrowing or like total return swaps from like a collection of banks.
All these banks lined up lots of money to buy stock. He bought all the stock. The stock went up because he was buying so much of it. Then he had a profit. He was able to borrow more money against the profit from the banks to buy more stock.
And this kept going. and like a sort of like virtuous cycle where the stocks went up and up and up and he got to buy more and more until ViacomCBS was like, our stock price has gone on this incredible run. We should sell some stock. So they sold some stock. The stock gapped down.
He had a loss. His banks issued margin calls. He was like, I don't have any money. I put every penny I have into these 12 stocks and they blew up. The stocks all went down.
He lost everything. And then he was arrested and he's going on trial next week for market manipulation.
I am so interested in this trial. I feel like that's going to be so interesting to follow. We also have to talk about his charity as well. One of the things actually that I was going to use to lead into this was I have a new name for your newsletter.
Oh, Money Failed?
Yeah, which is a biblical reference. That's Genesis 47. Money Failed.
Money Failed. Right. It's a biblical reference, but also not what you want when you're a hedge fund manager or a family office manager. That was, your job was to not have money fail, but money did fail.
Okay. Money failed, but the word of God doesn't fail. That is a quote that was used to describe this situation, which we don't have to get into, but the trial itself. So the trial, going on trial next week, I wanted to talk a little bit about the judge, Judge Alvin Hellerstein. He oversaw lawsuits arising from the 9-11 attacks.
He's also 90 years old, which I found extremely impressive. You know what I won't be doing at 90 years old?
I feel like this is tying back to the life insurance.
I will be selling my life insurance to Apollo.
What will you be doing at 90 years old? Not podcasting?
Yeah. And I definitely won't be.
Presiding over criminal trials?
Yeah. I mean, this is going to be a big one. Do you think about some of the charges that have been brought against him, including RICO charges?
There's two sort of types of charges against him. There's market manipulation charges, which I think is fascinating because his defense, it seems like is, I just like these stocks. I thought they were undervalued. So I bought as much as I could have them. And then the stock shot up and then that all blew up.
But they don't have a lot of, as far as I've seen so far from, like the charging documents, they don't seem to have a lot of evidence against that. It's like a crime of intent, right? Like? if he bought these stocks because he thought they were undervalued, then that's not market manipulation. If he bought them because he wanted to push their prices up in order to, like, get some benefit elsewhere, then it is market manipulation.
He didn't go around saying, I'm going to buy these stocks so I can push their prices up. What would be the point of the market manipulation? I think we talked on this podcast about the mango markets guy. We did. Yeah.
That was our first episode.
Best day of our lives. The mango markets guy, he like, did some stuff in crypto where basically he pushed up the price of this token and then extracted like a hundred million dollars from the token exchange and then ran away laughing, right? Bill Wang pushed up the price of these stocks and, like, borrowed more money against them to push up the price of the stocks more. And then at the end, it all collapsed. And he ran away with nothing.
More or less, he ran away with something, but we'll get into that. But the thing that you do in market manipulation is one, you push up the price of the stock and then two, you take the money out and he didn't take the money out, what was the market manipulation? It's a very strange case. He's got a real defense of, I wasn't manipulating the market. And the way you know that is because I didn't make any money.
Now, to be fair, he gave this talk about how money failed with this incredible slide, the Bloomberg story about this. There's a picture of him standing in front of his charity, talking about how money failed, with the big slide behind him saying money failed.
Explained beauty and simplicity.
It's so good. It's like the level of PowerPoint that I aspire to. He gave that talk at his like charitable foundation, which runs $500 million of assets, which is like, it's a lot. He didn't walk away from Archegos with no money. He walked away with $500 million in this charitable foundation.
And in fact, the Bloomberg story mentions that, like several of the old traders from Archegos are now working as traders at the charitable foundation. So it's like a little bit, he like scrolled away part of the hedge fund into the charitable foundation.
Yeah. And apparently it's assets grew significantly in 2023..
Just because it's run by some hedge fund traders.
Yeah. I want to know what they're doing.
Probably buying concentrated portfolio stocks that are going up.
There you go.
I would say. the other charges against him, though, are like about lying to banks. And that's much worse, because there's like an email chain, and it's mostly not from him. It's mostly from his like, his, like underlings, but like it's, you know, saying, Oh no, we don't have a concentrated portfolio of 12 stocks that we couldn't sell out of. We're very diversified.
And then like, that's not true. So there's some bad stuff there. And the bad stuff, it's one, like that's a crime, and lying to a bank is a crime. You can go to jail for a long time. But then also, just like, if you're asking the question of, was he manipulating the stock market?
Was he manipulating these stocks? Like just by the shape of his trades, you'd be like, maybe not, maybe just like the stocks, because he didn't withdraw any money, but then you're like, Oh, and also he was lying to the banks. It's like, okay, he was probably doing something.
And just to put some numbers on it, when it comes to how much the banks actually lost, we're talking about how Viacom CVS brought down Arcego's.
Well, they brought down Credit Suisse as well.
It was one of the things that brought down Credit Suisse, or in the chain of dominoes, it was somewhere in there, because Credit Suisse lost five and a half billion dollars. Nomura lost $3 billion, Morgan Stanley, more than $9 million. So, I mean, it's not chump change that we're talking about. This caused really widespread damage.
Yeah. I mean, he had like a $36 billion portfolio that went poof and like he lost whatever equity he had, but, like a lot of banks, lost a lot of money too.
That was a wild moment in time. I mean, it was also, what was that? 2021?? Yeah. March, 2021..
That was just a very upside down time for everyone.
It was a wild time. That was like, hey, this thing you've never heard of called Arcego's is like the biggest hedge fund in the world for like a week.
No one knew how to pronounce it. I remember I would have to go on and do like telephone phoners for television and trying to be Googling and YouTubing. How do I pronounce this? Archego's was something I'm pretty sure I said a few different times.
Understandable. Understandable. Yeah. But yeah, I'm always sort of allergic to the financial trope of like this company. you've never heard of controls the world, right?
Cause. now you've heard of Jane Street or you've heard of whatever, but like, I feel like really people had not heard of Arcego's cause. it really was like one guy's family office and then it was a gigantic hedge fund. that, or family office. By the way, I would call it a hedge fund and people from the hedge fund industry would be like, you're slandering us by calling Arcego's a hedge fund.
It is not a hedge fund. It is just the family office. It is not held to the same.
I can tell that you've been chewing on that. Like what to call it, just in this conversation.
It's. it's a $36 billion fund run by a hedge fund manager. So it feels like a hedge fund, even though it was only his money.
It was only his money.
Mailbag.
Mailbag.
We need a, we need a musical cue.
We should just both sing.
Perhaps only you should sing.
No, it'd be cute if we harmonized.
It would, it would be less cute if I harmonized.
You go high, I'll go low.
You did get a lot of mail this week.
We got emails at the moneypodatbloomberg.
net email address. And now we will read some of them. If you want your email to be read, send it to moneypodatbloomberg.net and we'll see what we can do.
Phil the jeweler, had some facts for us.
I don't think he signed his name, Phil the jeweler, but he's.
But his name is Phil and he is a metals and jewelry design professor.
Okay.
So Phil writes, I'm going to imagine that you are going to get a lot of this, but an ounce of gold does not weigh an ounce or, more specifically, gold is typically described and sold in Troy ounces and not the normal ounce we are used to. I can't pronounce that word. Avoir du poids? Ounce? I don't know.
It's pretty good.
So an ounce of gold weighs almost 1.
1 ounces. I'm guessing you probably already know this, but just because you mentioned that an ounce of gold weighed an ounce, I thought I would just send it in case. So I can't remember exactly how this originated.
Okay. So you were talking about how gold is heavy and you were like, it costs like $40 to mail an ounce of gold. And I was like, that's not that heavy. Like it's dense, but an ounce of gold weighs an ounce. And now we have received a reader correction pointing out that an ounce of gold does not weigh an ounce, which is really wild.
Let me clarify. What I was trying to say is that it's expensive to mail gold. I know. Do you want to talk about old fashions?
A little bit. So getting a correction from a reader that an ounce of gold does not weigh an ounce is one of my better corrections, but it reminds me of my very favorite, probably reader mailbag of all time, which is that years ago, I was writing about some article that described like a quantity of sugar, and they were like, that's enough to fill 3000 Olympic size swimming pools. And I was like, how is that a helpful description? Who puts sugar in swimming pools? And so I wrote jokingly, like if you combine 3000 Olympic size swimming pools of sugar or 3000 swimming pools of water to form 6000 Olympic size swimming pools of simple syrup, having Katie Ledecky swim through them and then use the syrup to make 3 trillion old fashioned cocktails.
And I got so many emails.
I mean, that's just bait.
I got emails that were like, actually, if you combine 3000 pools of sugar or 3000 pools of water, you wouldn't get 6000 pools, because the sugar dissolves in the water. The syrup that it makes is denser than the water. And so you'd only be able to fill about 4,500 pools with a combination of those 3000 and 3000 pools.
I'm kind of shocked that you would make such an error like that.
In retrospect, it seemed obvious and I was embarrassed. I also got greedy emails. It was around the time of the Olympics. Katie Ledecky was in the news. I read about her swimming through these pools of syrup.
And I said something like it would probably take her longer than her usual time to swim through a pool of syrup because it's thick and gooey.
You were kind of wrong on that.
I was wrong on that too. Apparently, Isaac Newton wrote about this, because it's like, it's harder to get through the pools. I'm making swimming motions that you can't see on this audio only podcast.
They're very convincing.
It's harder to, it's harder to move through the pool because it's thick, but you also get more force because you're pushing off on thicker stuff and they cancel out. And actually, professors have done experiments and it turns out to be true. You can swim just as fast in syrup as you can in water.
So one of my like rich person fantasies is to fill up a pool with pudding or jello and see what that would be like, but a little worried about suffocating.
Right. I don't want to give you any advice, but it does seem like you could swim as fast through pudding as you could through water. But I don't know what the sinking situation would be.
That is.
We're going to get email about that too.
Good. No, please. Someone write in about that, because obviously in water you float. I don't think you float in pudding.
I'm not going to speculate, but our readers will in life.
You learned your lesson. Yes, seriously.
Okay. All right. Now then.
Moving swiftly along. So Alex writes in, a version of the great consumer financial arbitrage I've heard goes as follow. One, get a no limit credit card from the bank. Two, using that card, buy the bank. Three, have the bank forgive your credit card debt.
Four, profit? Question mark? You own a bank now. Can't be that hard.
So why can't you buy a bank with a credit card? Because merchants have to agree to accept credit cards, right? Because it costs money to accept the credit card, right? Every time you do a credit card transaction, you have to pay the credit card company like one and a half percent or 2% of the transaction. So a lot of businesses want to accept credit cards so they can increase their sales, but M&A bankers are not one of those businesses, right?
They're like, we're not going to pay 2% to the credit card company. And also like, if you get a credit card to buy a bank, the credit card is not going to have a sufficient limit to buy the bank, you're not going to have like a hundred million dollar, $10 billion credit limit on your credit card. That said, the basic idea of like step one, borrow money. Step two, buy a bank. Step three, forgive the loan is like kind of a really deep one.
A lot of finance, a lot of financial companies work this way, where you have a giant pool of assets that is very levered. So a bank with $10 billion of assets will probably have stock that's worth $1 billion or less, right? It'll be like a 10 to one ish ratio of like assets to stock. If you could get a billion dollars and buy the stock, then you would control $10 billion of assets. Then you can just lend it all to yourself and forgive the loan.
And then you have a huge profit. This works financially. It's a good idea, except that it's like wildly illegal. Cause. you're stealing the money from the bank's customers.
But, like much of bank, regulation is geared around preventing people from doing that, right? Like the rules regulating related party loans, so that the president of a bank who controls the, you know, $1 billion of bank stock doesn't lend himself $10 billion and then forgive it. There's rules around that because, because it is a good idea. You don't see it that much in banking, but you see it a lot in insurance, where smart investors will say, let's buy life insurance policies. So that, but no, what I was thinking of is smart investors will say, I have a million dollars.
I would like to make investments. I'm really good at making investments. I'd like to make $10 million of investments. How can I do that? I only have $1 million.
I will buy a life insurance company for $1 million. And then I will have the life insurance company, you know, life insurance, also a very, very levered company, right? It has all this like policyholder assets that it can invest. I will buy the life insurance company stock for a million dollars. I'll take over the life insurance company, and then I will have $10 million to invest in all my other good ideas, right?
Sometimes people get arrested for this when, like they're good ideas or, like there are other weird companies that they are making concentrated, risky bets that sort of run afoul of life insurance standards. Other times, people who do this are Warren Buffett, like Warren Buffett, right? Like bought a life insurance company and now he'd like, controls the life insurance company and gets to make investments. And everyone's like, Oh, he's so good at making investments. It's good that he has this giant pool of life insurance money to invest.
And that's true. But like taking over a levered financial institution in order to control the money of that levered financial institution is a great idea and people do it sometimes.
So Alex sounds like you're on the right track, except for the illegality, right? For sure. But keep thinking. So Steve writes in with some stern words for you. He says from time to time, you mentioned dentists in your commentaries, certainly with more frequency than one would expect from a financial writer.
Sometimes you use dentists as the archetypal rubes getting scammed for an unsophisticated financial crime. I want to be shocked and offended by such a portrayal, perhaps having the American Dental Association brand you as an anti-dentite. My discussions with colleagues seem to bear that out that sure enough, dentists are greater rubes than the average well-educated professional. Could you comment on what you think uniquely qualifies dentists to be such rubes? And, more generally, what makes a good target for financial criminals?
I'm sorry to the dentists. I don't think I've really thought about it much as like dentists specifically. In fact, I think I once wrote that the general rule of US securities law is that you're not allowed to invest in like risky, weird private companies unless you're a dentist. But then I qualified it and said, or a radiologist or a retired professional football player. I mean, the point is that there are rules that say only qualified investors, any accredited investors they call can invest in certain like private offerings, right?
Private offerings typically have less disclosure, weirder financials, more fees, more hidden fees than like public market investments. And so there are a lot of people in the world whose job it is to find people to invest in not very good privately marketed investments. And so those people are looking for accredited investors, right? They're looking for people who make more than a certain amount of money. And dentists are a nice target because they all pretty much make more than the accredited investor threshold, which I think is like $200,000 a year, but they're not typically billionaires.
So they don't have like a family office that vets investments for them. They're not like tech startup. People who've exited. tech startups are good targets for private investments, but they're like connected to venture capitalists and they have access to good venture capital investments. If you're just like a dentist in the middle of the country, you have no like necessary, like connections to high finance, but you have enough money to be put into really bad investment decisions.
So people are targeting you. It's not that you're bad. It's that you're in that like narrow band of rich enough to have access to, like the worst possible investments, but also not so rich that you have access to the best possible investments. So I think that's the main reason.
Well, thank you for that.
Sorry, dentists.
Mailbag. You can send emails to moneypod.bloomberg.net if you want to be a participant in a future mailbag segment.
So you did. sing.
Oh, we're going to cut that out, though.
Mash them together. Like the harmonized. You did go high. So that was perfect. Should I go low?
Hey, that was the Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Levine.
And I'm Katie Greifeld.
You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg. Dot com.
And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day between 10 to 11 a.
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We'd love to hear from you. You can send an email to moneypod.bloomberg.net. Ask us a question and we might answer it on the air.
You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show.
The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam.
Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.
Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer.
And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast. We'll be back next week with more stuff.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high stakes poker to personal.
questions.
Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
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