The Big Short at 10: Michael Burry, Bubbles, and Bitcoin

By Richard Etchison, Senior Content Director, Aspectus Group

On the tenth anniversary of The Big Short, today’s financial system looks nothing like 2008. With AI, a private credit bubble, hybrid workplaces, fintech, and rapid information flows, any modern bubble — and its collapse — would unfold dramatically differently. This piece examines evolving risks, regulatory shifts, and what Michael Burry might do in 2026.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, and you and I bailed out the big banks to save the US economy, there was no cryptocurrency market, no private credit boom, no hybrid workplaces, no Dodd-Frank Act, and no ChatGPT.  

It’s been 10 years since the film “The Big Short” hit the movie screens at theaters near you – back when the movie industry was only beginning to struggle. The movie starred Steve Carrell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt, as well as some then lesser-known actors like Jeremy Strong (Succession) and some scene-stealing cameos by Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, and Margot Robbie breaking the fourth wall to explain CDOs and swaps to the average movie viewer. It made such an impression on me. I recall that I saw the film at a theater on the upper east side of Manhattan and walked out angry… and, yes, confused. Still, I loved the movie.  

It is safe to say that the pitfalls of a financial bubble bursting today would look much different than in 2008. Let’s take a look at what has changed and what remains the same, and how both the movie and the collapse look from the rearview mirror. 

Revisiting The Big Short through a 2025 lens     

Somehow, director Adam McKay and screenwriter Charles Randolph made a movie about collateralized debt obligations (CDO), credit default swaps, and subprime mortgage tranches entertaining and suspenseful. Its purposefully scattershot narrative structure was apropos for a story about our scattershot, inscrutable financial system.  

Michael Burry and his hedge fund, Scion Capital, discovered a bubble in the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market, making the ultimate contrarian $1.3 billion bet against the unflappable housing market. When one of his fund’s big investors asks Burry how he discovered the bubble within all the mortgages bonds, he answered, “I read them.” I cannot imagine how many spreadsheet pages of mortgage loans he pored over, line by line. 

Imagine having generative AI in 2007      

In an early scene, Burry asks his just-hired employee to get him the top 20 selling mortgage bonds and a list of the thousands and thousands of mortgages within each bond. In 2025, the dewy new analyst would ask his AI digital assistant to do that reading and it wouldn’t take long. But would the AI agent or large language model (LLM) know what it was looking for? Probably not. Burry could ask his LLM to count all the instances of “bad loans” by giving the AI the parameters defining what a bad loan is. Better yet, today’s buy-side investment management firms have access to data management and operations platforms purpose-built for capital markets, like one of our clients offers. Such tools are absolutely revolutionizing certain tasks, like streamlined loan tape cracking in private credit and natural language querying for generating bespoke reports. 

6 anachronisms in The Big Short 

One wouldn’t think that a movie that is only ten years old would have so many anachronisms in it. But, to be fair, it is a 10-year-old movie about an event that occurred 17 years ago. 

1. In-person job interviews 

2. Earbuds with a cord 

3. Michael Burry’s unacknowledged neurodivergence 

4. Thick notebook prospectuses 

5. Audio calls and travel instead of WhatsApp and Zoom 

6. New York rush hour: everybody commuting to work 

Today’s market anxiety  

In Q4 of 2025, as I write this, there is chatter in the capital markets trade media and national business media about potential bubbles in the markets. Some speculate it could be an overvaluation of AI deals. Some say it is the big seven tech stocks that are overwrought. Experts are warning that private credit is growing rapidly — now reaching everyday 401(k) investors — and that its opacity makes it hard for regulators to assess and manage potential systemic risks. Modern portfolios are cross-asset portfolios with a mix of bonds, equities, public and private market classes. A bubble enveloped in opaque private asset classes is tougher to see, whereas Burry’s mortgage-backed securities were semi-publicly available. 

WWMBD: What would Michael Burry do? 

The subprime mortgage crisis happened because managers wanted to sell more bonds and ran out of mortgages to put in the bonds. Does this sound familiar? Private market investments, especially private debt, have been the talk of capital markets for the past few years, but are inherently opaque when it comes to valuations and credit risk. Burry has not been crowing about private credit bubble risk, but he has been in the news as recently as December 2, 2025, when he spoke out against Bitcoin, calling it worthless and lambasted Tesla’s market capitalization as having been “overvalued” for a long time.ⁱ Burry has also sound the alarm about an AI bubble.  the alarm about an AI bubble.  

Meanwhile, other high-profile figures have been flagging the private credit issue, Jamie Dimon, Moody’s, and Jeffrey Gundlach, who said “garbage lending” in the private credit sector will cause the next big financial crisisⁱⁱ. Managers have sought out every possible avenue to keep the high returns and non-correlated diversification of private market assets growing.  

What’s different in 2025? 

In 2008, there was a housing boom; now, there is a housing shortage. In one scene in The Big Short, Brad Pitt’s eccentric, doomsayer Ben Rickert character is wearing a face mask while at an airport, and nods to a passing Asian traveler who is doing the same. Pre-2020, I recall thinking it curious that most of the mask-wearing people I saw were Asians visiting New York. Pitt’s character was prescient about the possibility of a worldwide pandemic.  

We thought information traveled fast in the aughts, with financial blogs, message boards, and forums like Elite Trader and Wall Street Oasis. Well, now information travels exponentially faster on platforms like Discord, Substack, Reddit, StockTwits, and WhatsApp. WhatsApp has become such a prevalent business communications tool that the SEC leveled massive enforcements against over 100 firms since 2021 to the tune of $2.2 billion for failures related to off-channel communications records required to be maintained under the securities laws.

Remember a life before Zoom, Bitcoin, and DoorDash? 

In the movie, Steve Carrell’s hedge fund manager character Mark Baum and his FrontPoint Partners crew travel down to Florida to see firsthand if there truly was a housing bubble. They met with a real estate agent, mortgage brokers, and yes, exotic dancers (cash payers who owned multiple homes). Some of those conversations today might take place on Zoom, an especially convenient way to meet with the exotic dancer instead of purchasing a dance, as Steve Carrell does in the movie. 

Additionally, there was no cryptocurrency or stablecoins in 2008. How could blockchain’s distributed ledger play a part in the next financial crisis? Moreover, banks used to handle most lending to consumers and corporates alike. Today, fintechs allow individual consumers to buy now, pay later (BNPL) for transactions as small as a DoorDash order from Panera Bread. Private credit lenders that provide these BNPL micro loans and other pooled loan products have seized a sizeable part of the credit pie from banks that were curtailed by regulations. 

Capital markets and fintech public relations, then and now 

Public relations, marketing, and communications for financial services and capital markets firms were quite different, too. We have several clients who provide technology solutions for these sectors, including regulatory technology (regtech), insurance technology (insurtech), and financial technology (fintech). Back then, there were many more news outlets and journalists to whom we could pitch stories and who accepted byline op-ed articles. Every year, a shrinking number of publications accept earned, unsponsored byline op-eds, which are valuable thought leadership content pieces that drive credible reputation bona-fides for client executive spokespeople and their brands.

The U.S. saw the loss of an average of two newspapers per week between late 2019 and May 2022; and from 2008 to 2020, the number of American newspaper journalists fell by more than half.^iv Back in those pre-cloud mass migration, Web 2.0 days, digital marketing was all about social media and rudimentary SEO. Now, we help clients deliver their messaging in an AI-omni-channel world with a new focus on generative engine optimization (GEO), complementing SEO.  

(Not high enough) Standards & Poor’s  

In act two of the movie, when the housing market begins to collapse with home mortgage defaults rising, our protagonists notice that bond values and CDOs rise instead of fall — and ratings agencies do not downgrade the bond ratings — despite the defaults. The FrontPoint Partners team led by Mark Baum pays a visit to the ratings agency Standards & Poor’s (S&P), where they confront the representative about why they haven’t downgraded the bond ratings. The S&P representative, played by Melissa Leo, admits, “If we deny them the rating they’ll go to Moody’s.” Steve Carrell’s character is shocked and offended by the corruption. 

The post financial crisis era was characterized by revamped regulatory frameworks as the US passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which also established the SEC Office of Credit Ratings that imposed new reporting, disclosure, and examination requirements on nationally recognized statistical rating organizations (NRSROs). This also required them to disclose their ratings methodology, among other things.  

Lessons learned, course corrected. Right? Right? 

Here we are on the tenth anniversary of The Big Short, and the SEC is easing regulations on investment banks as the US faces some thorny macroeconomic problems amid trade wars. Hopefully, there will be no AI or private credit bubble bursts, market meltdowns, or systemic collapses. If a Big Short style meltdown happened today, god forbid, how might the sequence of events unfold? Differently, one can assume. Faster and perhaps more widespread, given the increasing interdependency of the markets and institutions that run them. As much as we enjoyed watching The Big Short, no one needs or wants a sequel!  

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Key takeaways 

Why revisit The Big Short a decade after its release?

Because the financial system has transformed dramatically. Comparing 2008 to 2025 reveals how new technologies, asset classes, and information channels would reshape any modern bubble—or its bursting.

What would be the biggest difference if a crisis happened today?  

Speed. AI-powered analysis, digital communication channels, and globally intertwined markets would accelerate price moves, contagion, and regulatory response.

Is private credit today’s version of subprime mortgages?

Many experts say it could be. Its opacity, rapid growth, and new retail access via 401(k)s raise systemic-risk questions that echo pre-2008 behaviors. 

What does Michael Burry think of current markets?

Burry has recently criticized Bitcoin, Tesla valuations, and what he sees as an AI bubble—though he hasn’t directly targeted private credit. His contrarian instincts remain intact.

How has financial regulation evolved since the 2008 crisis?

Dodd-Frank, new credit-rating agency oversight, and enhanced disclosure rules reshaped the landscape—but in 2025, the SEC is easing certain investment-bank regulations again.

How has information flow changed market behavior? 

In 2008, blogs and forums spread news. In 2025, Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Substack move markets instantly—and regulators are cracking down on off-channel communication.

Could a Big Short-style meltdown still happen?

Yes – just differently. It would unfold faster, potentially more broadly, and involve new asset classes like private credit, fintech lending, or even crypto-adjacent instruments.

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About the author 

Richard Etchison, based in Boston, specializes in delivering elevated thought leadership, brand messaging, and marketing content for high-growth companies across financial services, capital markets, technology, energy & industrials, and professional services. Richard helps clients talk clearly about their brand, build authority and influence in their space, and distinguish themselves in the marketplace.