Bloomberg – Steven Eisman is shorting, or betting against, shares of higher- education companies because of the parallels he sees to the housing market, where prices began to fall in 2006 as loan defaults by homeowners with poor or limited credit history began to climb, he said. Like the lenders to these subprime borrowers, for-profit colleges boomed by saddling low-income people with debts they can\u2019t repay, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cUntil recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry\u201d said Eisman, 47, one of the sellers featured in \u201cThe Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine\u201d (Norton, 2010), Michael Lewis\u2019s book about investors who anticipated the housing bust. \u201cI was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.\u201d<\/p>\n