Jim Chanos

I think I've done enough.

You certainly ask interesting questions.

Good to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I teach a course on the history of financial fraud, as you know, and one of the themes of the course is that the fraud cycle follows the financial cycle with a lag.

And the more extreme the financial cycle, i.e., the bigger the bull market is,

Usually more fraud follows thereafter with a lag.

So you don't really see the large amounts of fraud until after the cycle turns.

This is early.

And a lot of consumer credit

Metrics are still kind of holding up, but we are starting to get some canaries in the coal mine.

In subprime auto, as you mentioned, the first brand's case is kind of mind-blowing, given what they were hiding.

And I suspect we'll see more, but I don't think we're going to see a tidal wave of it until the actual financial cycle turns.

And then I think we're going to see a lot of it.

This one's pretty extreme.

I mean, we're now really 16 years into a bull market in credit, in equities.

It's getting more speculative.

We saw a mini speculative blow off in 2021.

We're seeing it again in 2025.

Standards get reduced, as I like to say, people's sense of disbelief.