Sauer – Financial Treason & Crime

Who (Almost) Killed Home Capital Group?

Featured Posts, Investments, 02 April 2021

I am still coming to terms with the collapse in shares of Home Capital. It wasn’t supposed to play out this way. The Canadian alternative mortgage lender saw its shares fall from an all-time high of $54.86 in August of 2014 to a low of $5.85 in May of 2017. At the time, I was working as an analyst at one of Canada’s largest asset managers. I spent 2014 and 2015 following only the Canadian banking sector. I saw the events at Home Capital up close.

The company was in the crosshairs of short sellers for years prior to its 2017 crisis. As an alternative lender in Canada’s frothy housing market, many shorts saw parallels between Home Capital and some of the worst-performing American subprime lenders. Steve Eisman, made famous in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short for his success betting against the US subprime bubble, was one of the first to come out publicly as a bear on Home Capital in 2013. And from there the criticisms continued for years. Continue reading “Article: Who (Almost) Killed Home Capital Group?”

The Story of Deep Capture

By Mark Mitchell, with reporting by the Deep Capture Team

The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation’s finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark. In 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, “Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom.” For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, “something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, they are Wall Street and the financial media itself.” His exposé reveals a circle of corruption enclosing venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times. If you ever wonder how reporters react when a journalist investigates them (answer: like white-collar crooks they dodge interviews, lie, and hide behind lawyers), or if financial corruption interests you, then this is for you. It makes Grisham read like a book of bedtime stories, and exposes a scandal that may make Enron look like an afternoon tea.

Introduction By Patrick M. Byrne, Deep Capture Reporter

PDF (69 Pages): Deep Capture Story

Tag: Sauer

Article: Who (Almost) Killed Home Capital Group?

Paper: The Deep Capture Story by Mark Mitchell