lawsuits

Our Four Favorite Excerpts From The Big Short Lawsuit Against Michael Lewis

New Jersey asset manager Wing Chau is suing author Michael Lewis for making him look like “one of the villains” in his best-selling book on the financial crisis, The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine. Chau, who runs the asset management firm Harding Advisory also names hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman, one of Lewis’s sources, in the defamation suit, focusing on a passage that recounts a dinner conversation between Chau and Eisman, who made a successful bet in 2007 that the housing bubble was about to burst. But Business Insider says the real villians of the book are “the smart guys who walked away with billions,” whereas Chau comes off like a “dummy,” or end-buyer suckered into the deal. According to Lewis, Chau’s firm became “the biggest manager of CDOs tied to risky mortgages and related derivatives issued [in 2007],” essentially operating as a front for banks while his own firm defaulted.

But whether Chau is the bad guy or the patsy is less intriguing to us than how awesome Chau’s lawyers are at drafting a complaint. Here are our four favorite parts from the 37-page complaint:

1. The part where they use Eisman’s wife to insult him:
“Eisman has a well-known reputation for being offensive. Even on Wall Street people think he’s rude, obnoxious and aggressive,” according to his wife who met him while she worked on Wall Street.” See what they did there??

2. The part where they offer irrelevant details about Chau’s past:

Sure, it has absolutely nothing to do with collateralized debt obligations or the book. But the implication is clear: Michael Lewis hates immigrants. And Chinese food.

3. The part where they offer examples of how the world has changed since Lewis worked as a junior bond trader twenty years ago:

Pretty sure this part was just to prove they did read Bonfire of the Vanities. Well, either that or someone at Momolamken LLP has secret literary ambitions.

4. The part where they object to Lewis calling their client fat:

Comparing someone to a whale is gratuitous, a squirrel analogy is downright polite.

The Big Suit? Michael Lewis Sued Over Mortgage Meltdown Book [WSJ]
Wing Chau Is Suing Michael Lewis Because “The Big Short” Makes Him Look Like An Idiot [BI]

Our Four Favorite Excerpts From The Big Short Lawsuit Against Michael Lewis