(2020-04-30) Hunt Burn It The F Down

‘Burn. It. The. F#&!. Down.’ In early March, Ben Hunt was livid. “I haven’t said this in a while,” he noted, repeating what has become his signature line: “Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down.” (BITFD)

And that’s how Hunt, former hedge fund manager, chief risk officer, tech entrepreneur, political science professor, hobby farmer, and newsletter enthusiast, became a cult hero to tens of thousands of people around the world.

Hunt just landed a book deal with U.K. publisher Harriman House, and says he’s tentatively titling it Hollow Men, Hollow Markets: The Micro and Macro Foundations of a Financialized World.

Hunt has now left finance to go full-time with Epsilon Theory, which he launched as a sideline project in 2013. His writings were so provocative that Salient Partners, a Houston-based asset management firm, hired Hunt as its chief risk officer that year. At Salient, Hunt worked alongside Rusty Guinn, and the two spun off a separate company — Second Foundation Partners, a research and publishing firm — in 2018.

*By April he had helped launch a nonprofit, called Frontline Heroes, that has been able to procure N95 masks in China and get them straight to nurses and doctors in the U.S. So far the group has raised $800,000 and delivered masks all across the country through what Hunt calls an “underground railroad for PPE.”

“This really is how the world changes,” says Hunt, who likes to quote Margaret Mead’s famous line: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Beneath his gentle demeanor and Southern drawl, however, Hunt is furious.*

He ticks off a long list of familiar names he says lied about the coronavirus: the Chinese Communist Party, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and the White House, to name a few.

In late January, Hunt and Guinn began sounding the alarm that the disease then infecting Wuhan, China, was probably much worse than officialdom was letting on.

My central insight was that the numbers were made up. It was almost statistically impossible that the numbers the Chinese government was providing could have been true,” he says. He suspects the Chinese government created those numbers by using simple algorithms.

“The WHO created the story. The narrative around the disease was the real betrayal,” Hunt insists. Not only did the senior leadership betray its own scientists and doctors, he says, “it betrayed the entire world.”

By March 29, Hunt had found the perfect word to describe the leaders who were underplaying what was by then becoming a crisis of ghastly proportions: sociopaths.

Hunt defies political categorization, blaming both Republicans and Democrats for our current woes. But he has always “waded into politics,” notes Guinn, who recalls another insight of Hunt’s: Unlike most people in the financial industry, Hunt was predicting in 2016 that Donald Trump would win the presidential election “and that it’s going to break us.”

“The past 11 years was the greatest transfer of wealth to the managerial class,” he says. “You saw the naked sinews of power during the financial crisis, and today we’re seeing the same thing. Our economic relief is being geared, as always, in a trickle-down fashion.”

“There’s a real opportunity for a bottom-up grassroots social movement,” he says. “We absolutely can come out of this without the need for even more opportunity for the state and the rich to enshrine their positions.”