Michael Burry Has Taken a $1.6 Billion Bet Against The Stock Market: Should We be Concerned?

Adebayo Adeniran
4 min readAug 18

Is another collapse imminent?

Image via Twitter

The big short.

Anyone who has read Michael Lewis’s book or seen the Hollywood treatment will recognize the point of this article.

Of the cast of colourful characters (and there were lots) we meet over the course of the film, the one which stood out the most was Michael Burry.

But before we get to the actual subject of the post, I think that it is worthwhile writing a bit about the film or book.

The big short was essentially about the major players who foresaw the sub-prime collapse of 2008 and made a fortune betting against the global economy.

As much as I enjoy reading Michael Lewis (yes, I have read a good number of his books), watching the movie was so much better.

The format which the film director took made it so easy for those new to global finance to understand what was being portrayed and the mix of real finance players, celebrities and dark humour did guarantee its success at the box office.

Now back to the subject matter.

Michael Burry, a Stamford university medical drop-out, started his own firm —Scion Capital — after having spent inordinate amounts of time studying value investing and stocks.

In the run up to 2008, his outfit was consistently out-performing the market and when it was confirmed that liquidity had completely run out and bail out from the government was the only option, those who had betted against their own economy stood to gain the most.

And Scion capital made billions of dollars in profit.

But that was then and this is now.

Here we are in the final months of 2023.

And according to the man who foresaw 2008, we are headed for another Wall street collapse at the end of the year.

Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible