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SE Steve Eisman Steve Eisman Investor known for betting against the subprime mortgage market before the 2008 financial crisis, a story told in Michael Lewis's book The Big Short.

“What I find disturbing is some of the off-balance-sheet financing using special purpose vehicles that I thought had gone the way of the dodo bird after the Enron and post-GFC debacles. I was wrong. It's still happening, and in size, and boy, do I feel foolish.”

The Real Eisman Playbook · September 2026

“What I find disturbing is some of the off-balance-sheet financing using special purpose vehicles that I thought had gone the way of the dodo bird after the Enron and post-GFC debacles. I was wrong. It's still happening, and in size, and boy, do I feel foolish.” — Steve Eisman, The Real Eisman Playbook

Context

Eisman spends much of this weekly wrap on how AI data centers are being financed, using Meta's $27 billion Louisiana project as his example: the debt sits in a special purpose vehicle Meta owns 20% of, so it stays off Meta's balance sheet even though Meta builds it, rents it for 20 years, and absorbs the overruns. He walks through Enron's SPVs and the pre-2008 structured investment vehicles as precedent, and expects more such deals, "and not just at Meta."

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Transcript

The Real Eisman Playbook Around 07:03 into the episode
Steve Eisman

…I'm providing you in this class with all the tools to understand how banks work and how to think about large cap and small cap and mid-cap and the investment banks as well. This coming Wednesday, September 30th, we will post an interview with Edwin Dorsey, creator of the Bear Cave newsletter.

Edwin Dorsey

I believe these prediction markets provide a lot of high-quality value and information, which helps people make better decisions.

Steve Eisman

Ed has become a real expert in prediction markets, and we spend a great deal of time discussing the value of prediction markets and their problems. Also, we get occasional requests from subscribers to purchase our coffee mugs, pillows, and other merchandise. Go to steveeisman.com, which will bring you to Substack and our merchandise page. On this week's wrap, we will discuss the war in Iran, oil prices, and interest rates, troubling news from Oracle and Blue Owl Capital, Paramount cleared for takeoff, softbank junk borrowing to fund an equity investment, some aspects of AI circular financing that I find particularly disturbing. Meta's beignet, Meta's Muse, now that Agentic AI is cute, is it deflationary and will it make a real difference? And one mailbag about shorting against the box. And now let's get started. I've said this before. This is a tough market, and that the only two variables that matter right now are oil prices and the 10-year yield, neither of which, in my view, is predictable and both of which move the market. War news flips…

Speaker 4

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Steve Eisman

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Speaker 4

I see you.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Real Eisman Playbook

“During the first half of this year, I thought that Anthropic and OpenAI were benefiting a lot from token maxing. That was where enterprises told their employees to use AI and to hell with the cost. But that ended this summer when costs got out of control and companies now had the option to switch to cheaper open weight models. So I assumed that once token maxing ended, growth would slow…” — Steve Eisman, The Real Eisman Playbook “This is a big problem for us because the more debt we issue, the more interest rate-sensitive investors we have to attract into the market to buy. So what happens is you get an accelerationist effect on the rise in interest rates, because the profile of our investors is getting worse and worse as the deficit gets worse.” — Benn Steil, The Real Eisman Playbook