ninme

This is fascinating:

The Times - No contest for Mr Unpopular
LA Notebook: the man who made squillions from the property crisis is not a well-liked man here, by Chris Ayres

In case you’ve never heard of Greene, here are the facts: he is a 53-year-old real-estate investor who lives in a 40,000 sq ft Beverly Hills mansion called Palazzo di Amore. He owns three aeroplanes and a yacht, and Mike Tyson was best man at his $1 million wedding.

And there’s more: Greene reportedly got the idea from his friend John Paulson, who has done exactly the same thing, only with slightly different results: he made $4 billion in the past six months. That’s $22 million per day.

These trades are surely right up there with George Soros’s mugging of the pound on Black Wednesday, 15 years ago. But why didn’t Paulson take the ultimate unpopularity title? Because he lives on the East Coast, of course. But Greene shouldn’t take it too hard. After all, when Hollywood gets back to work, there will almost certainly be a screenplay in the works about the great property bubble of the past five years.

It’s like that whole short stocks thing in the last James Bond movie. It took Peter three days to explain that to me, probably because he wasn’t too clear on the concept either. But the things people do, hey? You’d think though, with the way the cable channels have been clucking about the impending bubble-burst for all these years, there’d be more than just the two of them.