Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Are We Back to 2008? With The Big Short's Steve Eisman

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Is 2008 repeating itself? That’s the big question in the headlines, and today Nicole is talking to the perfect person to answer that question.  Steve Eisman doesn’t need much of an introduction���he’s the investor who famously saw what no one else saw in 2008 and bet against the market before the crash (he was portrayed by Steve Carell in The Big Short). Today, Steve tells Nicole whether he thinks history is repeating itself, whether we're on-track for a recession, and his thoughts for new investors. Check out Steve's new podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-eisman-playbook/id1806975494

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Bank NA. Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Out-of-network ATM withdrawal and OTC advance fees may apply. Late payment may negatively impact your credit I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. Is 2008 repeating itself? That is the question I keep seeing in the headlines and today I'm talking to the perfect person to answer that question. Steve Eisman doesn't need much of an introduction. He's the investor who famously saw what no one else saw in 2008 and bet against the market before the crash. He was immortalized in the movie The Big Short.

He was portrayed by Steve Carell in that movie, so kind of a big deal. Now he's talking about what he's seeing in the current market on his podcast, The Iseman Playbook, and today right here on Money Rehab. So I asked him the big question, is this history repeating itself? And he answers that and a lot more. He tells me whether he thinks we're on track for a recession, where he sees opportunities in this market, what he thinks Trump is going to do next, and his advice for new investors. Steve Iceman, welcome to Money Rehab. Glad to be here. Damn, it's been a week. How are you doing? Really? Did something happen this week? Yeah, no, I haven't looked at the news

lately. Who do you think needs a hug right now? Who needs a hug? I think a lot of people need a hug. I don't know about you, but I think everybody's pretty emotionally exhausted from this week. Yeah, I need a hug. I mean, for those who haven't listened to Steve's podcast yet, the Iceman Playbook, please run, don't walk, and listen. You and your team talk about the story of 08 where you guys met with the CEO of WaMu who knew you were short their stock. And as soon as you walked in, you said, you look like you need a hug.

He did badly. And I hugged him. A lot of people need a hug these days. It goes a long way. I want to do some time travel back to 08 but I want to start with where we are right now. We're talking on Thursday, April 10th and I preface this because every day is some big move. Every day? How about every hour?

Every hour. You need Valium or a drinker, I don't know, both. Or not look. That too. So is that what you suggest? I mean, this week the market dropped 10% on Trump's tariffs, rallied 9%, we are back down 5% I think at the time we're talking. Is this a relief rally that we're gonna settle into

or is this more of a bear market? What is going on? I don't know if it's a bear market yet. In normal times, markets have many variables. PE, earnings, maybe there's some news about OPEC. It's multifaceted. Every now and then, 08, COVID, now, it all gets boiled down to one thing. And the one thing right now is what's going to happen with trade. And, you know, people are trading headlines because

they're petrified there'll be a trade war and therefore a recession. And then when they have news that says maybe there won't be a trade war, they get euphoric. It's going to be like this for a while. So big swings. where they get euphoric. fear index has been up for a while, P's have been high, multiples have been high. There's been a lot of warning signs flashing across the market for a while now, even before all the tweets on tariffs and announcements on tariffs. Do you think even if we didn't have all this tariff drama, we were bound for a correction anyway? No, I don't think we were back for a correction at all. I'm actually, generally speaking, pretty positive on the US economy.

I think the US economy is more dynamic than it's been certainly in my lifetime. And so the long term is very good. But this is certainly a wrinkle. I mean, historically, we've had a correction every couple of years anyway. So of course, and percent, you know, every now and then you get somebody at some interview who says, you know, generally, it's like Tommy Lee, he'll say something like on a day when the market goes down, well, it's a correction. It's healthy.

And my response to that is, I don't need to be so healthy. I mean, do you think that the market was sick? No, I don't think it was sick before this at all. So you have said that you thought of tariffs continued, we'd be in a global recession. They have paused for 90 days now. Do you still think that? I think there's a lot more going on here than just, you know, terrorist trade war. And I think to understand that you need to go back to the 90s.

President Clinton, we had President Clinton, and President Clinton ushered in NAFTA, and he brought in China into the world trading system. And he did so, he made two arguments. His argument, number one was that improving global trade along those lines would accelerate GDP growth and it would create jobs. And he was 100% right on the former and he was 1000% wrong on the latter. After the big short movie, I got this really great speaking gig. I traveled all over the country, different universities, places, conferences. I saw parts of the country I really had never seen before. If you go to a university town, generally you fly into some airport and you have to

drive for an hour, an hour and a half and you go through the towns of America. And what you see in the South, the Midwest is not only did people lose their jobs, they lost their communities. So I think what President Trump is arguing, and you can disagree or agree, I have great sympathy for it, is that we really screwed a whole half the country because of free trade. Now it ushered in an enormous bull market

with some fits and starts, but generally since 1994, it's been a tremendous bull market where people like me and others of my socioeconomic class have made a lot of money. But the other half of the country got obliterated. And we didn't even retrain these people. We said, you're on your own, go learn how to code. And they didn't learn how to code. So I think he's trying to achieve two things. He's trying to improve the terms of trade and he's trying to bring back a lot of jobs

to the United States. Now, how do you do that? Oh, I'll tell you, you don't do that. The way you don't do that is convene meeting with the G7 and say, hey guys, the United States needs to change the terms of trade because it's not fair. Will you help me out? They'll laugh at you. The only way to change the terms of trade is to put a bazooka to people's heads.

And once you put a bazooka to people's heads, people start negotiating. And the other thing that I think is often missing from conversations that you see on podcasts and television is that the United States is in the best possible position of any country to change the terms of trade. Hard stop. Because the percentage of US GDP that comes from exports is only 11%. That's about the lowest number in the world. If you look at a region by region, country by country, if you were to Google China and say, ask Google or perplexity or Gemini and ask what percentage of China's GDP comes from export, you'd get 19%. And that number is not right because so much of China's exports get routed to Vietnam and Cambodia, etc., and then come

overseas. My guess is that number is probably closer to 30%. Europe, every significant country in Europe is in excess of 30%, with the exception of Germany, which is over 40%. Mexico and Canada are both 35% of their GDP is from exports. And of that 35%, 25 of that 35% is pure exports to the United States. So my hope is simply that the US, in terms of who's in the best position to negotiate, the US is in the best possible position.

So if everybody's- Because the numbers are so low. Because the numbers are so low and everybody else's number is so high and they all need, they all need X source, X. They all need access to our consumer. I mean, Mercedes-Benz, you think Mercedes-Benz can survive by not selling any cars to the United States? I don't think so.

So if everybody's rational, and believe me, that is a big if, people will come to the United States and they'll negotiate. Now, I have a very good friend who runs a hotel in DC, and by chance I was speaking to him this weekend, and he said, what he's hearing from all the other managers of hotels, because they all know each other, is that the hotels of DC are packed with people from countries looking to negotiate with the Trump administration, as we speak. So like I said, if everybody's rational, everybody will try and cut as good a deal as they possibly can.

Now, not everybody is always rational, as we know. Is China rational? We're going to come to that in a second, but you know, politicians have to get reelected, they may feel like if they cut too good a deal, they get thrown out of office. So I can't handicap this. China, I think, is a different animal. I'm not sure what the administration's motivation here is. I think they, perhaps they would take it either way.

If they could negotiate a good deal with they perhaps they would take it either way. If they can negotiate a good deal with China, they would. And if they have to leave the tariffs on and basically cut China off from the United States, they'll do that too. So you may have a situation where everybody, everybody but China cuts the deal. That's possible. And in that case, are we still going to be okay? You said on CNBC- I think we will be okay. I mean, you were short everything in 08. You said you're long only now.

How long is long? In other words, how long do you think this bear market vibe session is going to last? Couple months. That's it? Well, they'll negotiate. They'll either negotiate or they won't negotiate. vibe session is gonna last. A couple months. That's it? They will negotiate, you know, they'll either negotiate or they won't negotiate. It's not gonna take, I think, more than a couple of months to be very clear of what directions is going in.

Okay, let's talk about an underlying issue here that you've talked about before. It was cool. I did an episode this week about the theory that tariffs weren't about a trade war. they were about a yield war, that a crash in the market would mean people would essentially flock to bonds and yields would drop and that would help the government refinance the $9 trillion of debt over the next year. It's a good conspiracy theory. Do you think it's a conspiracy theory or do you think that's what's going on? Because yields haven't dropped. Yields haven't dropped. So it's weird, What's going on? You know, every now and then you get into an environment where people in the bond market start to question the reserve status of the dollar. So you get these short-term periods where

either the dollar sells off or yields go up because people are selling the bond, which is basically the same thing. And I think we're in a little bit of that right now. And that's why I think yields haven't dropped. I don't think that's a long-term problem though. Edith Smith So you think yields will go down with the- Michael Fisk Well, if we have a recession, it will definitely- Edith Smith Do you think it's also potentially people are covering the losses from the market by selling bonds? I mean, I don't know where hedge funds stand right now. Yesterday was so crazy. Clearly, there

were a lot of people over their skis and they were just covering like crazy. But I can't answer that question. I don't know. So race will go down. Sounds like that's inevitable. We don't know when. The president thinks he controls the Fed. He does not, but he can sort of force the hand and put pressure on it. You said on your podcast that if the goal is for rates to go down, then perhaps looking at investing in assets that benefit from lower rates,

like home builders or real estate, could be a move. How is that view complicated by rates not cooperating? I think the rate story is more short-term so eventually they'll come down. The problem with making a bet on home builders, and I have a little bit of the bet myself, but the problem with making a bigger bet is that if let's say tomorrow, hypothetically, every country reaches a deal, and you know, the economy is fine again, you know, rates aren't going to go down and then there goes your homebuilder trade. So everything is just so binary related to the macro, that, you know, the only thing I would tell people, and this is what I've done myself, is you should de-risk.

You should sell. You don't go crazy because if you sell everything, you're paying taxes. But if there's something in your portfolio that you've kept but you're not that crazy about, sell it. If you think you can afford to pay taxes and lighten up so you'll have some cash so you could sleep at night, do that. But I wouldn't do anything draconian. Sell it at a loss, sell it at a gain, you say pay taxes. If you can afford to pay the taxes, you should sell some and just pay the taxes. But I wouldn't do anything big. Well, you said you're long for a few months,

presumably when we get more clarity on tariffs. And then what happens after that? Are you short? Well, I have some cash and hopefully things get better a few months, presumably when we get more clarity on tariffs. And then what happens after that? Are you shorting? But wouldn't you buy stuff when things are not better? Well, like I said, it's so binary. The tariff situation could go the wrong way, and then everything you'll have bought will go down. So, you know, this is such a binary one dimensional market. It's very difficult to handicap. What I'm telling people is don't be a hero.

So take a pause. I mean, when any cuckoo crazy stuff goes on, it's better to take a pause, go through a breakup, have a market issue. Nobody regrets a pause. Ray Dalio warning about a sovereign debt crisis in the midst of all this. Do you buy that argument? Not even a little bit. I just don't. I think the entire, the deficit is too big, the de-dollarization, everybody's going to sell their treasuries. It's Armageddon, cats and dogs are going to lie down together. It's the end of the world. Story has been told on and off by people for 40 years.

What I think people miss about when they talk about sovereign debt crisis stuff is that the entire global financial system runs on treasuries, period. global financial system runs on treasuries, period. Banks do overnight rebows, which is where they lend to each other overnight. They do it in treasuries. Sovereign wealth funds park the money, they do it in treasuries. There is no alternative.

And the reason why there is no alternative is there's no other asset class that is anywhere close to was liquid or is safe. So if the Chinese bond market was a much bigger and better market or crypto was 1000 times bigger than it is today, we could have a discussion. Until then, it's just short-term generations as far as I'm concerned. So the probability you'd assign to a US debt crisis in the next five or 10 years is zero? I don't know about zero.

A lot of things happen in five to 10 years, but right as long as it's not something I worry about. I just don't worry about it. So do you think Ray needs a hug? I think he needs a hug. He does. He needs a little bit of a hug. I mean, when we talk about this number, though, Steve, nine

trillion in treasuries is a lot to finance. Yeah, but the economy is a lot bigger. You know, they were saying the same thing when it was one trillion. It's just a number. I just don't think it's an issue. So that number doesn't scare you more than subprime mortgages did in 07? No, subprime mortgages scared me to death. This does not scare me that much. Does anything scare you right now?

Yeah, what scares me is potential for a trade war. That scares me. I wouldn't put that as a zero probability. Yeah, President Trump is playing high stakes poker right now. Do you think he's just gonna say, psych just kidding? That's what's no, I don't think he's gonna say psych just kidding. Everyone, you could like President Trump, you could dislike President

Trump. I'm not making a political pitch here. But I think one thing that is extremely admirable about him is that he's one of the few politicians I've ever seen where he actually goes out and does what he told you he was going to do. He campaigned on this. This is what he's one of the few politicians I've ever seen where he actually goes out and does what he told you he was going to do. He campaigned on this. This is what he, you know, everybody was shocked by. He told you he was going to do it and he did it.

And everybody's like, I can't believe he did it. I said, what do you mean? This is not like, you know, when President Bush got elected the second time and it was the first time I came up with which one it was. And then, and they immediately tried to change Social Security. And everybody said, what do you mean you're trying to change Social Security? You didn't mention this on the campaign.

This was front and center throughout the campaign. So I don't understand why people are shocked. I guess I just, you know, I think part of the issue that people have is everybody that we know took Econ 101. And in Econ 101, they all taught you that free trade is good, tariffs are bad, trade wars are terrible, and they showed it to you with graphs and tables and pictures, and it's all very convincing and mostly right.

Except what they didn't tell you is that free trade can obliterate industries. When you took Econ 101, they made it sound like if you divide the world between guns and butter, one country should produce all guns and the other country should produce all butter and everybody would be better off. What was never discussed was, yeah, but what happens to all the people who are making butter who lose their jobs? They make it sound like they're all going to get a job making guns. That's not how it works.

You know, all these people lost their jobs, and a lot of them are on welfare, and nobody ever offered them an opportunity to retrain. So it's gotten very, it got very ugly. Well, I'm glad that you mentioned that he did campaign on this. We knew this, this wasn't a surprise. I think the thing people are most concerned about is the extent with which he did it, right?

This wasn't a scalpel, this was a hatchet. There's a bazooka. Bazooka. Yeah. People thought there would be tariffs, just not this aggressive. Is that fair? I think it's this. Yes, I agree. But I think if you take a step back again and ask yourself, if you want to change the terms of trade, how are you going to do that? You can't be nice. You got to be mean. You got to be mean. You got to be tough. And then given the fact that only 11% of our GDP is from exports, let's talk.

You don't have much to lose. It's not that you don't have much to lose. You have something to lose. You have less to lose than everybody else. Hold onto your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more money rehab. So we opened the door, Steve, up to a little 2008 discussion.

Some reporters are out there. I'm sure you've seen them all. They're all calling me. They basically say, please, well, things are answering. I think the end of the world again. And I'm like, dude, I've been there before. I'm not predicting again if I don't believe in it. So you don't. I don't. So what, in what ways do you think that this moment is similar or dissimilar? To owe it.

The difference between then and now is now you have a let's let's make a worst case scenario. There's a trade war of some undetermined dimension and it causes a global recession. mention, and it causes a global recession. That to me is the worst case scenario for here. The worst case scenario in 2008 was the end of everything. Is a big difference. When, let's take an example. If General Motors tomorrow went bankrupt, Let's just say hypothetically.

What would happen? Everybody who works at General Motors would lose their jobs, and the government did not bail them out, let's say. Worst case scenario for GM, got liquidated. General Motors goes bankrupt, its employees lose their jobs. A lot of the companies who supply things to General Motors

would have to lay people off. Some of them would go out of business. For that part of the industry, of the economy, that would be very bad. And how much an impact it would have on the entire economy of the United States, I can't dimension it, but it maybe would cause a recession. Maybe. I don't know. When JP Morgan goes down, planet earth burns.

Hard stop. It's the end. People can't get their money, but nobody trades stocks. Things stop. You know, I had, after O8, I was talking to a friend of mine who ran a small chemical company in New Jersey.

And I said to him, like, when it was over, I said, what was 08 like for you? And he said, well, he said the first nine months of 08 were good. And then things stopped. I said, you mean, like things slowed down? He said, no, things stopped. Nothing moved. And that's because people were worried about the money, the money that they had in the bank. You know, when you're worried about the money that you have in the bank, things stop. When there's a global trade war, there's a recession.

It's a whole other dimension. Yeah. Your morning paper losses in this case. And back then you were worried about getting anything out. Anything. Right. You were worried that things were going to go to zero. Now we're just like, oh, well, my portfolio isn't up 20%.

It's I've lost money down 10%. Right. Yeah. Which David Portnoy, for example, was upset over the weekend. I think that he was down $7 million. He was down $7 million from 100. Nobody likes to come down, but there's a difference between going from 100 million

to 93 million versus going to 100 million and worrying that your 100 million is gone. Yeah, but I don't even know if Dave's 7 million was some paper game that he rejoiced and he thought he had. Like did he actually lose money? Right, the most important game in the market at the day to buy and sell.

Yeah, you look at your portfolio and when it's lower and you feel bad. I mean, that's how we all react. Yeah, but you know, morning paper losses, rejoicing paper gains is a tricky business to be in. Absolutely. So in 08, the crash was about excessive leverage, systemic risk, hiding in plain sight. What we're seeing now though...

And so I'm not hiding in plain sight. Well, one of the reasons you were able to see what no one else did in 08 is you were looking at these primary sources, right? You were going to Phoenix, you were going to Miami, you were seeing the stuff with your own eyes. You were looking past the headlines and was Twitter around then? Twitter was around then. You were going to Phoenix, you were going to Miami, you were seeing the stuff with your own eyes, you were looking past the headlines and was Twitter around then? Twitter was around then. You were looking past, presumably, I don't know if you were looking at tweets at the time.

I was not on Twitter. But the usual talking points, and that's harder to do now, especially when everybody with a TikTok account can call themselves a financial advisor because they stayed at a Holiday Inn once. Right. financial advisor because they stayed at a Holiday Inn once. So where would you tell new retail investors to go to assess an investment opportunity? Well the first thing I would say to people is that the statement that I'm looking for an information edge is overrated. And what I mean by that is, you know, people think that in 07 and 08

that I had access to information that other people did not have. And that's just not true. You know, the biggest data source that I had was from Moody's, where the securitization report, every securitization reports all its credit data every single month.

That was the Bible. That piece of information that came out every month during two days a month in the middle of the month was more important than anything else because those were hard numbers and they couldn't be faked. And I viewed that data very, very negatively and it kept reinforcing the other research that I did. But other people who looked at the same data came to conclusions that, well, it's bad, but it'll get better.

So information is important. It's the interpretation of the information I think that is more important. So what are you looking at now? Are you still looking at Moody's? I look at the Moody's data, but there isn't a credit issue in the United States at this point. If there was a recession, see, the difference between then and now in terms of credit data was there, leverage got so high and so many bad loans were made that the credit data deteriorated before there was a recession, which is unusual. Usually what happens is there's a recession, people get laid off, and then the data gets bad.

So right now, if you were to do a deep dive in the credit data, you would see delinquencies are up some, it's no calamity, you know, it's within the normal bounds. And if you talk to all the banks, they basically say the same thing. Now, if there's a global trade war, and then there's a global recession, the data will get bad, but that's almost tautological. Do you think there is an issue with the housing market? Not even a little bit, in terms of credit. I don't think a subprime mortgage loan has been made in the United States since 2007. I may be exaggerating a little bit, but basically there are

no subprime mortgage loans made in the United States. The issue with the housing market is that it's locked and the reason why it's locked is that during COVID, because rates went to zero, anybody with a pulse refinanced their mortgage at 3%. And why would they give that up? And exactly. And so if you're gonna buy someone's home today, you're paying six and a half, seven.

One thing I learned in first grade is that six and a half seven is a lot more than three. In fact, it's more than twice as much. And so it's very hard to get, that's why existing home sales are so moribund. And the new homes are doing very well for a while. And the big home builders were creating people incentives. They were buying down people's rates, and that helped a lot. But that seems to have run a lot of its course.

So even new home sales are kind of just flattish. The only thing that's going to get the housing market really going again is either time, a lot of time, or rates have to come down. I think mortgage rates have to get to five, something like that. I mean people think that they're gonna get back to three though and I think that it's important to remember. Well, things get back to three, that would be very bad for everybody. Right, okay so can you unpack that because we had unnaturally low interest for everybody. next to nothing, when we had next to zero interest rates, that was because we were facing Armageddon. We were facing the end of the world.

So for rates to go back to three, God forbid they should go back to three. Because if rates go back to three, we'll have so many other problems. You're not going to be worried about buying a house. You'd be worried about a lot about the things. So. Because these are emergency extraordinary measures. Exactly. So could they get to five, five and a half? Yes. Would that help the housing market? Absolutely. Is everybody with a 3% mortgage that owns a home going to sell their home?

No. So an inventory problem. It's an inventory problem. It will certainly help. How much? We'll see. Well, we'll have to watch a 10-year, which is, I think looking at how yields are reacting is a really fascinating part of this whole story. I agree. Near term, people are taking a short term view that the whole trade policy puts the dollar at risk. I think that's wrong for the reasons that I went into, but that you know you can't, short term trading is short term trading. It'll work itself out eventually. So just to clarify when you say de-risk to our listeners who are nervous, maybe even panicking. De-risk means scooting more over into fixed income

into US treasuries, right? Or is there something else? Or just put your money into your money market fund and sit and wait, you know, treasury money market fund, which is paying for foreign change. It's not so bad, you know, just park it there. You don't have to worry about it. And then when you feel more comfortable, you buy again. So having the dry powder, are you waiting for a 2000 point drop? I'm not waiting for 2000 point. Not you. No,

I understand what you're saying. What I am waiting for is resolution. Certainty. There's some level of certainty about which way this is going to go. Because if it resolves well, and you've raised some cash, so you missed the first couple of days. Big deal. If it resolves well, you're back to a bull market that will probably last years. So what difference does it make? On the other hand, if it resolves poorly, you'll be happy to have had some of that cash. Well, when this has happened before, 87 we mentioned in 08 and 2020, the next five years have gone up 100%. Correct. But during the interim, it was hell. It sucks. It was hell. It sucks. All right. see, we end our episodes by asking all of our guests for one tip that listeners

can take straight to the bank. Straight to the bank? Straight to the banks that still exist, that are still standing. Straight to Jamie Dynan. I'll give a career tip since your audience skews young and maybe this will be helpful to them. And this is partly from my own personal experience. So if you go back in time, I graduated law school, I clerked for federal judge, which was great,

and I went to work for a big corporate law firm and I was utterly miserable. So here's my lesson is that I don't agree with Warren Buffett where he says pursue your passion. And the reason why I don't agree with it is you could love opera, but if you can't sing, you're gonna be an opera singer. Pursue your attributes. So what I tell, when people come to me for career advice, what I say to them is try and figure out

what are your attributes? What are you naturally good at? Is it math, is it science? Is it writing? Whatever it is, the career you choose should be the place where you can do that, as opposed to being around peg in the square hole. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lapin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some Money Rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.

And follow us on Instagram at MoneyNews and TikTok at MoneyNewsNetwork for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.