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The Big Short's Michael Burry Just Sold All His Stocks and Bought 106 Private Prisons

Is a massive crash coming?

October 06, 2022

The Big Short’s Michael Burry Just Sold All His Stocks and Bought Private Prisons — He Clearly Thinks a Crash Is Coming

First of all — and this really needs to be said — Michael Burry is not a hero, he’s a predator.

During the 2008 crash, while millions of families lost their homes and savings due to bankster criminality, hedge fund gambler Michael Burry extracted billions of dollars in profits to deliver to some of the richest parasite shareholders in the world. He and his backers delivered zero value to the world, and created and contributed no new wealth — they simply made a bet with a bunch of greedy banksters and won.

Michael Burry isn’t a contributor to the real economy, he’s a leading extractor in the parasite anti-economy.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s dive in…

What does Michael Burry do for a living?

He buys extraction machines (called “shares in corporations”) in order to suppress worker wages so he can nab some of the wealth that they created.

But a few weeks ago, his parasite management company, Scion Asset Management, sold off all its extraction machines, totaling nearly $200 million in stock market exits.

Why?

Because Michael Burry clearly thinks those extraction machines are overpriced and will be falling in price shortly.

  • He sold Discovery (Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, etc)

  • He sold war criminal-run Facebook AKA Meta Platforms

  • He sold monopoly Google AKA Alphabet

  • He sold Stellantis, the monopoly carmaker of Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, Dodge, and a dozen others.

  • He sold everything — an insurance conglomerate, a media conglomerate, a fossil fuels conglomerate, a payments conglomerate, and a pharma monopoly.

And then he bought 501,360 extraction machines:

501,360 shares of GEO at a cost of $3,309,000.

What is GEO?

“GEO Group, Inc. owns, leases, and manages secure facilities, processing centers, and reentry centers in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The company operates through four segments: U.S. Secure Services, Electronic Monitoring and Supervision Services, Reentry Services, and International Services. As of December 31, 2021, it owned and managed approximately 86,000 beds at 106 secure and community services facilities.”

That’s corporatespeak for: Michael Burry wants to get richer from passively extracting profit from private prisons, mental health facilities, and immigration detention centers.

GEO, for the record, is a wretched corporation:

“The company has been the subject of civil suits in the United States by prisoners and families of prisoners for injuries due to riots and poor treatment at prisons and immigrant detention facilities which it has operated. Related federal investigations of kickback and bribery schemes associated with nearly $1 billion in Mississippi state contracts for prisons and related services have resulted in the criminal prosecution of several public officials in the state.”

The fact that America even allows corporatized prisons is appalling to most people outside of the United States.

Adam Smith said that capitalism is all about incentives. That gives us two choices:

  1. If we democratized prisons — IE, got rid of the corporate profit motive — the goal would be to rehabilitate people as quickly as possible so they can get them back to their families and become contributors to society.

  2. Corporatized prisons, on the other hand, have a financial incentive to a.) keep prisoners in prison as long as possible, b.) ensure they keep prisoner standards of living as low as possible in order to maximize profits, and c.) ensure prisoners aren’t actually rehabilitated so they come back to prison as soon as possible.

It is morally and financially abhorrent that any nation would privatize prisons instead of democratizing them.

Prisons should serve society, not hyper-rich shareholders.

But Michael Burry doesn’t care.

As the global economy crashes yet again, and poverty and crime start to soar, Burry’s prisons will get a new influx of highly-profitable customers, all paid for with your tax dollars.

Truly an American hero for all of us to emulate.