BONUS: Muddy Waters Capital Founder Carson Block

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1:56when you book direct with Sinesta Travel Pass. Here today, roam tomorrow. Join now at Sinesta.com. Terms and conditions apply. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio. This week, we have an extra special bonus episode. live from Future Proof, my conversation with Muddy Waters' Carson Block. Really a fascinating conversation, not only about how he developed an interest in shorting fraudulent equities and companies, but how his firm has evolved into a comprehensive research shop and a long, short hedge fund. I thought the conversation was fascinating.

2:54And I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Muddy Waters, Carson Block, live at Citywide Future Proof Miami. I'm so fascinated by your career, what you've done, what you've built. I first kind of became aware of you, I don't know, it seems like it was a long time ago with the reverse Chinese mergers and Sinophorus then, wait, China is doing what? I don't understand any of this. Tell us how you kind of fell into that aspect of markets and how you ended up becoming an activist short seller. I will try to nutshell this, but I grew up in investing. My father was an equity analyst and was working with him from 99 to 02, long side, covering micro caps.

3:51And we were just getting lied to incessantly by these managements. And back then they had 45 days to file their forms for. So we take them on non-deal roadshow to meet institutions, stock would go up, and we'd find out later that they hit the bid. So this is the same time that you had the largest companies in the world, like Enron, WorldCom, HealthSouth, Adelphia, blowing up an accounting scandal. So my realization around 2002, I was really demoralized. It's like, look, I want to be an investor, but this market is riddled with financial predators from top to bottom. How do I protect myself against that?

4:36So I went to law school with just this amorphous idea that that would give me some tools. And, you know, fast forward, decided to practice law, ended up in China, Jones Day, left to start the first self-storage business in mainland China. I don't recommend it. And anyway, I was just sort of, you know, keep trying to keep that business from failing in 2009 when my father got really excited about a bunch of these Chinese companies that had gone public in the U.S. via reverse merger. And I had my own problems. I wasn't really that interested. But he asked me to look, and he asked me to look at this first one called Orient Paper.

5:17And the first thing he told me, he'd been at a conference that these guys had gone to. And what he's hearing is, oh, Chairman Leo, he's different from other Chinese company chairman. He doesn't smoke, and he doesn't chase women. And my father's telling me this when I'm in late night in Shanghai. And I'm like, I'm sure neither of those things is actually true. But the fact that this is making its rounds at the conference, somebody is trying to game Western investor psychology. So that got my attention. Early 2010, went up to see the company, and it was a Potemkin factory. I never believed that such a thing could exist, where at the time its market cap was$150 million, had just reported$103 million in revenue.

6:04And the real revenue,$2 to$5 million. That it was these empty box. So I exposed that with the 30 some odd page report. And the only reason I did that was I felt like I was stuck in my business in Shanghai. Like a few hundred people who are leaving their stuff in my facility. The industry did not exist because it's a bad industry to be in in China. And I don't know, there's like a power in feeling like you have nothing to lose. So I just threw the ball as far down the field as I could, wrote that report. It went viral, quickly found out this was systemic. And one year later, Bloomberg's like, oh, he's one of the 50 most influential in global finance with Ben Bernanke and Warren Buffett.

6:46And I was like, well, yes, of course, that's the natural path from self-storage. That's every 30-page analyst report tends to lead to that. So it's funny because you and I kind of came of age in the markets, similar period. The dot-com implosion was certainly fundamental to my view of both markets and short sellers, and then the financial crisis. How do you look at how the markets have changed over the ensuing decade as between QE and zero interest rate policy, and more recently, the CARES Act and the Maskell fiscal stimulus? I grew up thinking short sellers were the ones who kept the market honest and responsible.

7:29That seems to be a minority view these days. Yeah, well, I've come to the view that there's an inverse relationship between interest rates and the amount of dishonesty in society. So the lower your rates, the more easy money is, the more dishonesty you get in society. And so the emergency monetary policy outlived the emergency. And what I felt is that just each year I've been doing this, that investors are more and more anesthetized to risk. Now, the flip side of that is that behaviors that were once really only present in micro cap land, well, those bubble up to mid cap land because of the inflation of market cap.

8:18So on one hand, my business has gotten harder because unless it's something really, really egregious, people don't care. But then, yes, you'll find that type of behavior now, even in mid-cap companies and in an environment where, and just to be clear, it's a small minority of companies that are frauds. The world's bigger problem is the gray zone, right? The things where nobody's going to get convicted. Lawyers have signed off. The auditor is okay with it. And that gray zone behavior whereby you can significantly misrepresent economic reality, that is almost maybe the norm in many respects. So the secret is to corrupt the attorneys and the auditors and then it's home free.

9:09Wait, corrupt the attorneys? Right. So you mentioned micro caps, small cap, mid caps. I read a note of yours not too long ago talking about the big caps and the mega caps, where so many people have been calling this a bubble and so many people have saying, gee, I'd like to shorten video. You kind of went out of your way to say, hey, maybe one day there's a downside play here, but this freight train is really difficult to step in front of. What are your thoughts on the hyperscalers, the mega cap tech companies? Three things. Number one, there are easier, better shorts out there than NVIDIA. Number two, the reason why I was making those comments is that flows have driven so much of this.

9:56You have obviously the passive bid and it squeezes floats. And by squeezing floats, it's not a linear impact on stock prices, it's a parabolic impact on stock prices, at least of the winners. So the idea that something is overvalued, that's a reference to its fundamental value, but I think you have to consider its technical value. And that's what everybody fails to say when they're criticizing these things on a fundamental basis. It's like, well, what are the technicals of this? Now, that's my second point. My third point is, up till one month ago, I was completely sanguine on S &P and markets in general and the economy, and my view has 180'd.

10:44And I think the wrong question is, well, what do you think of the valuations or stock prices of XYZ of these AI companies? And the right question is, what is about to happen to society and to the market as a result of AI? And like I said, I'm 180 on this. Like a month ago, I wouldn't even refer to these models as AI. I had this rule. These are large language models. They are not going to create new information. They merely process information that's already out there. Don't call it AI. They're LLMs, but I call it AI now. Right. They're neither artificial nor intelligent. They're something else.

11:22But given that, and given this 180, we're going to dive right into AI in a minute. But since you built your reputation before the firm has pivoted into a full service research shop, both long and short, you've criticized SPACs, crypto, thematic ETFs, NFTs. Where has there been the biggest destruction of investor wealth in that group? Well, in that group. OK, so it's a little bit in vogue, I think, to point toward private credit right now. And the reality is, who knows? There's no data. It's really opaque. My concerns there, and I recognize that data is not the plural of anecdote, but in the past few months, some of the research we've done, I've looked at some ABS issuers, and this is not private credit, but I was really surprised to see as I went down the rabbit hole of ABS issuances that a lot of the paperwork that should be done to basically show release of liens of loans that are being securitized and filed publicly, that paperwork is not being filed publicly.

12:36And I, at first I thought, oh my God, we've got these guys on fraud. They're, they're selling off loans that are still encumbered. And I spoke with a couple of, uh, securitization attorneys and they said, no, no, no, that's market practice. The, uh, the warehouse lender just provides a letter saying that the liens are released. It doesn't get filed publicly. And so I asked each of them, well, what's to stop the sponsor of the securitization from forging the letter because he thinks like, look, the loans are, the ABSs are already over collateralized. I can double pledge these. You know, because if the warehouse lender, if it's not public, the warehouse lender wouldn't know if somebody forged it.

13:11Huh? Yeah, that's a good point. And so I, when I see that the largest financial institutions are not dotting I's and crossing T's. That conversation with somebody recently who gave me a data point from a private equity firm that's doing a lot of CLOs, the conversation from somebody who's on the PE side going to the CLO guys was like, so what do we know about the performance of the underlying loans? How are they performing? Huh? Why would we track that? We don't service them. This is reminiscent of... Right out of the big short. Yeah, this is reminiscent of some of the behaviors in credit. So then, okay, I combine, again, it's not data, these are anecdotes, but I combine that with also what I noticed starting a few years ago.

13:57You know, every time I talk to an allocator, you know, we're actually, we run a fund, we're a hedge fund. So, you know, we're talking to allocators all the time. And, you know, what are you guys investing in? Everybody all of a sudden starts saying private credit, private credit, private credit. You know, that also reminds me of the internet bubble, because the way I used to think about that as it was happening is there's too much money chasing too few investable companies. So I don't think if there are problems in private credit, like my first bet is not that it's at Apollo. But I also know we have looked at the insurance industry.

14:31And so I know a lot of these insurers have been bought by smaller PE firms. I mean, they're basically using these things to finance their deals. The FT did a great article, Alphaville, a few months ago on the credit ratings agencies. I mean, it's not even S &P and Moody's. The number one is Egan Jones. So corporate headquarters is like an eight-bedroom house in suburban Boston, literally. And I think they did like 2 ,000 deals last year that they rated. I mean, if you lived through the GFC and were paying attention, you know, like starting to see some dots connect. So that does have me worried also.

15:10And if that does intersect with what I think could happen in the labor markets from AI job displacement, you know, like I know you want to pivot back to it, but I'm just going to put it out there. I think it's not unrealistic to say 15 % of knowledge work jobs in the U.S. in three years are gone. And if it's not three, it's going to be five. But it might not be 15. It could be 20, 25%. I mean, that's, and I can work through how I got there. Let's dive deeper into AI. It's both an investable asset, a shortable asset, and a tool that you're using to run a business. So I want to hit each of those things, starting with, how are you using AI as a tool to manage a business, to identify long and short opportunities?

16:00What does true AI, not just LLMs, mean for your daily work? Well, I mean, in the past, again, since finding religion just a few weeks ago, I mean, this is something I've been hammering. Most of my employees have worked for me for over 10 years. We're an old firm for a hedge fund. I mean, I used to joke that, this is probably true, that if you look at trips and falls per dollar of AUM, we maybe are the highest in the world. And that was kind of funny to say until I started saying, guys, why are you literally taking months to put together 150-page slide decks to discuss something internally? Stick it in the machine.

16:45And so one of my analysts, my longest-serving employee, ex-auditor, super bright, but always struggled with communication. I mean, one of my skills was over, you know, months, weeks or months, many, many hours trying to draw out of her the patterns that she sees, but she's just unable to elucidate. Now, she's just pumping out the memoranda from Claude. And I'm like, wow, this is, I mean, Cindy, this has saved us like, you know, probably five weeks of, you know, like frustrated conversations in the conference room. So from that perspective, it's helping, I think, hurting a little bit. You know, I've always felt that we have an edge as activist short sellers over our competition in terms of how I write and communicate.

17:37Like, that edge is gone. I mean, you can go to Claude and say, hey, you know, write this up as a short report in the voice of Carson Block. And, you know, it's not bad. I mean, it gets you a lot of the way there. So let me flip the question on you and ask, how has AI changed the fraudster's toolkit? What can Claude do for a fabricated document, deep fakes, fake video, fake voice, fake docs, fake everything? Has it just become an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys? Well, look, I mean, the tools for forgery never really needed to be that sophisticated. I mean, one of my favorite examples of that was the Peregrine Financial.

18:25That guy had a post office box and an inkjet. And that's how he forged his auditor letters. And, you know, that was a few hundred million. Bernie Madoff did not exactly use the most sophisticated technology. Yeah. I think the thing that will get to be more interesting is if you're a company CEO and, you know, you're kind of, you know, like you're pumping your stock price. you're monetizing it and hitting the bid. I think the more interesting thing is querying it. You know, if I were the CEO of XYZ company, what would a short seller focus on? You know, like what should I do about that? So I think that we're going to get in this cat and mouse game of preemption and reaction.

19:10But I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, if you're, you know, if you're just ramping your stock price and mortgaging your future, I mean, I think as activist short sellers will still get there, but you could at least dig a wider moat around what you're doing if you use these AI tools. So I always think of short sellers like Jim Chanos and the original guys who really pioneered forensic accounting as being so deep into the documents. How useful are tools like Claude Cowork as a forensic accountant to help either identify patterns in every SEC filing or honing in on a specific company's filings and seeing what doesn't smell right?

19:59For me, that's a little TBD. I don't know yet. I mean, I'm not sure that you can just upload a 10K and say, oh, you know, what's dodgy about this? I mean, first of all, Well, one of the secrets, it's not a secret, but what we do is we obtain documents from places people never look. So, again, we're pulling UCC files to look at asset securitizations. We love companies that have overseas subsidiaries because most overseas jurisdictions, there are publicly filed financial statements. So we'll pull those and upload them. And then also, I'm sure it really helped connect the dots with people. I mean, right now or up till now, we've had to rely on memory like, oh, wait, yeah, this dude, you know, we've looked at 58 entities.

20:47This dude was in that entity. Oh, interesting. So the AI is going to get rid of it. It's going to make that part easy. But you still have to go out and do the legwork. And, you know, a lot of times you have to send people in person to do document retrieval. So I don't think it's as simple as, you know, hey, I woke up today and I want to be an activist short seller. Like, you know, what's, you know, Claude, which company should I write about? And, you know, what's my thesis? Like, you have to still do a lot of legwork. But the accounting stuff, Claude has demonstrated internally, again, turning my accounting analyst, the former auditor, turning her poorly expressed thoughts into actual words.

21:30It's, you know, and of course she's iterating with it. No, no, no, that's not what I mean. But it's got real accounting knowledge. Oh, well, according to ASC, blah, blah, blah. And this does not meet the definition of the da, da, da. Wow. I mean, that's, it's really interesting. I mean, look, I think at the end of the day, part of the edge of being an activist short seller is the willingness to be sued or the tolerance for being sued. So I'm not worried that a bunch of people are going to run out and like commoditize this. And I think at the end of the day, also having a brand where if everybody can produce, skeptical pieces.

22:02It's also knowing when the model is kind of bullshitting you, right? Like, because that happens too. I mean, these things are sycophantic. Like, whoa, that's brilliant. Of course it's a fraud, Carson. Like, you know, no. To say nothing of double checking for hallucinations and a bunch of lawyers who have been using AI keep getting into trouble because it's citing cases that don't really exist. and the judge's clerk, also using AI, discovers these cases don't exist. But you mentioned a word that's really fascinating. You mentioned edge. If all the participants in the markets, long and short, are using the same tools, is there any edge to be had there?

22:48Or is it really about how you're applying these tools, where the edge comes from? That's an interesting question. I mean, look, on the short side, you only make money if people care, right? And so I think that's been the problem that most, so since the GFC, almost everybody who was running money principally focused on short strategies has gone out of business. I mean, some, you know, they rode off into the sunset, you know, made a bunch of money, most carried out. You know, I think the problem that a lot of the short sellers have had, and I had this too, you know, and have, I have to actively correct for it is you try, you tend to view the world the way it should be, not the way it is.

23:31And so that's the problem. Like when people short, you know, Tesla, cause you know, Elon Musk, this and that, like nobody cares. Right. And that, that's, that's the thing. So I, I think you to be good on the short side, you have to understand why people are buying the stock and you have to have a view that goes directly against that or that undermines that thesis. And I think so much of the time that doesn't happen. So I don't know. I don't know that this erodes the edge of judgment when it comes to the long side or short side. And then on the long side, I mean, kind of buy what the smart money is buying seems to have worked.

24:12Like I hate to say it, but you know, again, technicals versus fundamental value, the technical value of something. I don't know that AI helps a ton with that right now, but it certainly can. Let's talk about AI pretenders, and I'm pulling something else you had written a while ago, and there's a little bit of a rhyme with late 90s, every company added a dot-com and their stock would see a pop. What are you noticing amongst the fake AI stories, the fake pivots, the companies that really have nothing whatsoever to use to do with AI other than two or three people who work for the company have a perplexity app on their phone.

24:52Tell us about the narrative of AI pretenders. Well, I look, I think if all of a sudden a company has started talking. So I first did this shortly after I started on the, on the short side, um, cloud became the thing. Right. And so then saw some companies that had just done a global find and replace, like, you know, find this, replace it with cloud. And so if you see that with AI in a company's filings and in their statements, then yeah, I mean, they're probably a pretender. I mean, I think it's pretty clear, you know, AI, real AI requires scale. I mean, whether you're on the hardware side or you're, you know, or you're actually producing the AI models.

25:37So I don't know, everybody who's like AI enabled, and look, I'm out over my skis here because I don't really understand the technology, but everybody who's AI enabled, it's like, well, what's the foundation? You know, if you are an AI enabled this, what are you running? Are you running perplexity, claw, chat GPT? And if you're like, well, I made it myself. No, man, like I'm not going to buy that. You know, like these things have cost way too many billions of dollars to develop for you to be able to vibe code your AI? Short sellers are always looking for a downside catalyst. When you start thinking about the mega caps, the hyperscalers, or anybody else that's really blown up in value and in price, that's created a little bit of an air pocket.

26:22Has that catalyst come in yet? Or is there something off in the future that's going to lead people to say, hey, this has gone too far. We need to take something off the table. Well, if you take my view that a lot of these names have traded based on their technical values as opposed to fundamental, then you need to get into, okay, what are the underlying technicals here? So I'm a fan of a guy named Mike Green. So I think Mike is going to prove to be really prophetic. And so what he's been saying since maybe 18 or 19 is that some passive has broken the market, you know, don't disagree, but that when the flows, especially the buying from the target date funds tapers off, and then you get net outflows, that's when you get, as he calls it, or was calling it, 1929 magnitude crash at, you know, fill in the year, you know, fill in the blank with the year speed.

27:22And that's what scares me about AI because, you know, like I said, if, if I, if this thesis is correct, that then if three years or a few years, 15 % of knowledge workers have lost their jobs, it's not like they're going to find new jobs. It's not like, you know, fiscal or monetary stimulus creates new knowledge work jobs. They're going to, and they all have college debt, mortgages, car leases, eventually they're going to start hitting up their 401ks. And so first they stop contributing as they're laid off. Then they need that money and they start taking early redemptions. And so if Mike Green is correct, that when that happens, there's nobody there to catch the falling knife.

28:09And the technicals have basically for, you know, better, since the GFC just created this tremendous amount of air, that's when it's really time to panic because that's what, I think that's what's going to make his thesis, that's what's going to test his thesis. And if you asked me five weeks ago, you know, did I think that we're in any danger, anything on the horizon in terms of seeing, you know, reversal of 401k flows and significant rise in unemployment, I would have said no. I was completely sanguine five weeks ago. And like I said, I've 180. So I can't leave on that much of a downbeat note.

28:53So for the last question, you run a long, short funds. If that's the downside of AI, if that's the negative we're seeing in the world of white collar work. What's the long side of the portfolio? What looks attractive through and on the other side of whatever happens with either the AI thesis or Green's thesis? Well, okay, the tough thing is there obviously are going to be companies that benefit from AI, right? And so they're the hyperscalers. But if you have, but if they're in the index, which they all are, and they're major parts of the index, and you have index fund flows, well, the bull case is that over the long term, there's going to be a great buying opportunity.

29:40So I'm not sure that's where you hide out. I mean, what we've been doing for the past month is creating a set of what I think are highly convex trades in the book, especially basically shorting credit. So it's not like the lead up to the GFC. There's not a deep CDS market. But I mean, credit spreads are stupidly tight and credit vol is stupidly low. So to me, you want convexity and there are lots of ways to pay it where you're capping your potential loss. That's how we're that's how we're approaching it. So like and look, I hope this doesn't play out. I mean, I because I don't have like a plan B or C after AI takes, you know, like my job.