'Big Short' investor Michael Burry compares the market slump to a plane crash — and hints tumbling stocks and home sales remind him of the housing bubble bursting
- Michael Burry hinted that sliding stocks and falling home sales remind him of the 2008 housing bust.
- Observing the current market is like watching a plane crash, the "Big Short" investor said.
Tumbling stocks and slowing home sales remind Michael Burry of the collapse of the mid-2000s housing bubble, the investor of "The Big Short" fame hinted in a now-deleted tweet on Tuesday.
"As I said about 2008, it is like watching a plane crash," he said. "It hurts, it is not fun, and I'm not smiling."
Burry told New York magazine in December 2015 that as the housing market crumbled in late 2007, he had a recurring nightmare about the disaster, in the form of an airplane crashing.
"I knew what was happening, but there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do to stop it," he told the publication. Burry added that on the last day of 2007, he was too upset by the catastrophe to leave his office and go home to see his family.
The Scion Asset Management boss posted his latest tweet shortly after the US government released data showing sales of new, single-family homes fell by nearly 17% month-on-month to 591,000 units in April — well below the consensus forecast of 750,000 units.
Moreover, the benchmark S&P 500 index slid as much as 2.5% on Tuesday, and closed 18% lower for the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell as much as 3.8%, and has now slumped 29% this year.
Burry shot to fame after he predicted, and made a fortune betting on, the housing-market crash in 2007 and 2008. He has repeatedly drawn parallels between the run-up in asset prices during the COVID-19 pandemic and the bubble that made him famous.
"Fads today (#BTC, #EV, SAAS #memestocks) are like housing in 2007," he tweeted in March 2021.
"On the whole, not wrong, just driven by speculative fervor to insane heights from which the fall will be dramatic and painful," he added.
Burry, who bet against Tesla stock last year, has also compared the hype around Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company to the housing boom.
"Well, my last Big Short got bigger and bigger and BIGGER too," he tweeted in response to Tesla's stock price soaring. "Enjoy it while it lasts."
Tesla stock has plunged 48% this year, wiping close to $600 billion from its market capitalization.
More broadly, Burry has predicted the next market crash will dwarf the 2008 bust, which sparked a global financial crisis.
He sounded the alarm on the "greatest speculative bubble of all time in all things" last summer, and warned retail investors pouring their money into meme stocks and cryptocurrencies that they were barreling towards the "mother of all crashes."