Kyle Bass’s Texas Feud Spotlights Short-Selling Tactics (Bloomberg)
Ernest Poole had been dead for more than 60 years when someone opened an account in his name at an online platform called Harvest Exchange. Poole, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was best known for his sympathetic pieces about the Russian Revolution. The platform was strictly for capitalists. Poole was a pseudonym for Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager who had taken out what amounts to a Wall Street bounty on a Texas real estate investment trust called United Development Funding. Best known for shorting subprime mortgages ahead of the financial crisis, a Powerball-type win that brought him fame and fortune, Bass had come to believe that UDF was a crooked company hiding losses amid fraudulent transactions with developers. His fund, Hayman Capital Management, had spent months building a short position that would pay off if UDF’s shares tanked.
Ernest Poole had been dead for more than 60 years when someone opened an account in his name at an online platform called Harvest Exchange. Poole, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was best known for his sympathetic pieces about the Russian Revolution. The platform was strictly for capitalists. Poole was a pseudonym for Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager who had taken out what amounts to a Wall Street bounty on a Texas real estate investment trust called United Development Funding. Best known for shorting subprime mortgages ahead of the financial crisis, a Powerball-type win that brought him fame and fortune, Bass had come to believe that UDF was a crooked company hiding losses amid fraudulent transactions with developers. His fund, Hayman Capital Management, had spent months building a short position that would pay off if UDF’s shares tanked.
