Words matter. These are the best James Chanos Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The interesting thing about the China story, getting back to the macro and micro, and as dire as I think the macro story is – due to bad credit and credit extension that makes Greece and Spain and the U.S. look like child’s play – when you get to the micro of individual companies, they look even worse.
I’ll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I’m also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It’s one of the few checks and balances in the market.
So you know, everyone points out Greece’s default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.
The marginal people on the trading desks, there’s no skill set. If they don’t trade derivatives, I don’t know what they can do. The next stop is driving a cab.
Dubai was a property bubble. Plain and simple. Go to Dubai and see what happened. It was… what I call it the ‘Edifice complex’ – it’s just, we can grow by putting up lots and lots of buildings and trying to attract people to come here, stay here, and put up offices here and sooner or later, you put up too many.
It’s very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.
If you’re a short-seller, that’s a cacophony of negative reinforcement. You’re basically told that you’re wrong in every way imaginable every day. It takes a certain type of individual to drown that noise and negative reinforcement out and to remind oneself that their work is accurate and what they’re hearing is not.
The U.S. healthcare system is probably the most interesting large group of companies that are heading for major problems that we’ve seen in a long, long time.
People who lose money always need someone to blame.
I’ve learned there’s a big difference between a long-focused value investor and a good short-seller. That difference is psychological and I think it falls into the realm of behavioral finance.
The investment we’re all looking for is actually saving labor… Look at what the internet is doing to retail.
Healthcare is growing now at about 10 per cent per annum in the U.S. top line, versus 3 per cent for the economy. As someone with a sharp pencil and an eye for this kind of thing, this can’t last.
The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that’s the one thing a lot of people don’t realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It’s not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.
Increasingly, the real estate developers can’t get bank loans for their project financing in China. They’re now going into the Hong Kong market to raise money in the bond market at very, very high rates, as high as 15, 20 percent.
What people don’t realize is that China papered over its last two credit bubbles, those in 1999 and 2004. The banks were never bailed out – they just exchanged their bad loans for questionable bonds from quasi-state organizations.
