After making the short heard 'round the world with his bet against the subprime mortgage market, Steve Eisman, one of the key players in "The Big Short," now has his crosshairs set on the for-profit education sector.
The industry makes most of its money off of federally-backed student loans and now, the Department of Education has proposed new rules that may significantly curb their profits.
The CEO of ITT Education [ESI 57.81 1.10 (+1.94%) ] recently said on CNBC that the underprivileged will be hurt most by these new regulations.
"His argument is so pathetic. It would be laughable. His argument is essentially that we educate the underprivileged. We provide education that you can't get elsewhere. So leave us alone," Eisman, managing director of FrontPoint Partners, told CNBC's "The Strategy Session" on Wednesday.
Eisman said ITT's argument sounds an awful lot like the argument being made a few years ago for the subprime mortgage market, which was the catalyst for the financial crisis.
"Let me just change a couple of words: Everybody should own a home. We give more mortgages to people who don't deserve them elsewhere — despite the fact that we're ripping off our customers' faces and putting them in a mortgage they can't afford to pay us back," Eisman said.
"The difference between this and subprime is in subprime, the loans went bad no matter what the government did. Here, this scheme is going to go on until the government stops it," Eisman said.
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