Home prices had been on a five-year tear, rising more than 10 percent annually. Bass conceived a hedge fund that bet on a crash for residential real estate by trading securities based on subprime mortgages to the least credit-worthy borrowers. The investment bank, which Bass declines to identify, owned billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities.
``Interesting presentation,'' Bass says the firm's chief risk officer said into his ear, his arm draped across Bass's shoulders. ``God, I hope you're wrong.''
Within six months, Bass was right. Delinquencies of home loans made to people with poor credit reached record levels, and prices for the securities backed by these subprime mortgages plunged. The world's biggest financial institutions would write off more than $80 billion in subprime losses, while Bass, his allies and a handful of Wall Street proprietary trading desks racked up billions in profits.
Bass and investors like him saw opportunity in a range of new investment tools that banks created to sell subprime securities worldwide. These included mortgage bond derivatives, contracts whose values were tied to packages of home loans. The vehicles allowed hedge funds like Bass's to bet against particular pools of mortgages.
Bass, a former salesman for Bear Stearns Cos. and Legg Mason Inc., had struck out on his own in early 2006. He started Hayman Capital Partners, specializing in corporate turnarounds, restructurings and mortgages. Bass isn't related to the Texas billionaire Robert Bass.
Bass named Hayman for the private island off Australia where he spent his honeymoon. He drove a $200,000 500-horsepower Porsche Ruf RTurbo with a built-in racecar-style crash cage.
A former competitive diver who had put himself through Texas Christian University in Fort Worth partly on an athletic scholarship, Bass was about to take his most ambitious plunge yet: betting home values would decline for the first time since the Great Depression.
``We were saying that there were going to be $1 trillion in loans in trouble,'' Bass says. ``That had really never happened before. You had to have an imagination to believe us.''
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