  The $2 Billion Mall Rats Catie McKee, Dan McNamara, and their boss Marc Rosenthal had millions of dollars riding on Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut. The trio worked at MP Securitized Credit Partners, a tiny Wall Street hedge fund, and they'd stopped by the typical middle class shopping center in search of signs of life: Who was at JCPenney? Claire's? Hot Topic? ThriftBois? What was up at VAPE CITY or BrowArt23? They couldn't help but notice there was something depressing about the place: discounts galore, emptiness in every direction, a foreboding aura that signaled the end was near. It didn't look good for anyone hoping for the mall's success. But Rosenthal, McKee, and McNamara weren't betting on Crystal Mall thriving—they were betting on it failing, and spectacularly.
It was October 2019. The threesome was in the business of betting against—or "shorting," in financial jargon—commercial mortgage bonds, specifically those heavily weighted with debt issued to shopping malls. A year prior, in 2018, the team made a $2 billion bet that a series of shopping malls, including Crystal Mall, would eventually fail. If retail tenants vacated and the malls' landlords defaulted on their mortgages, MP stood to make a killing. They had taken many trips like the one to Crystal Mall over the past two years: this downtrodden mall after that one, seeing firsthand the shopping centers, once the heart of the American retail sector that, they were certain, would soon be underwater.
It was a proposition which, in the age of Amazon, couldn't possibly be considered risky on its face, but in the minds of traders on Wall Street, the threesome was taking a contrarian view: The conventional wisdom stood to reason that the debt propping up these shopping centers was stable, at least for now, whereas the team at MP was convinced that the malls' landlords would default on their mortgages by 2022—and, most importantly, that if they didn't have their bet placed now, they'd miss the chance at a huge payday.   The 35 Best Gifts for People Who Take Their Whiskey Seriously Whiskey is like a religion, and the people who follow it are intense. It can be a little intimidating to try to choose a gift to get one of these big whiskey types, especially if you're not an expert yourself. It shouldn't be, not with the holiday madness approaching. Here are the 35 best gifts to get whiskey lovers that will fit into their whiskey-drinking lifestyle with ease.
 50 Gifts to Get If Your Dad Seems to Have Already Everything Finding the "right" gift for for your dad is always a daunting task. What the hell do you get the man who invested countless hours in making sure your childhood wasn't a complete shit show—sacrificing his own wants and needs time and time again— only to have you get a dual degree in, like, Drama and Graphic Design while you still swipe his credit card with impunity every time you order takeout? Tracking down the perfect present should involve more than a last-minute run to the liquor store to pick up his preferred brand of booze, or hitting up your equally saint-like mother to find out where he gets his ties. Dear old dad deserves a form of recognition as unique as he is, even, and especially, if he insists he wants nothing at all this year (as per usual) because "you're the best gift he could've asked for." Scroll through the options rounded up here and look like you put some actual effort into finding a gift for your dad this holiday season—even if you're desperately speed-reading through this the night before you're all supposed to swap presents. Love you, Pops.  The 2020 Esquire Gadget Awards Even as the sky rained down shards of glass and balls of fire, the tech industry stayed the rigorous course in the year 2020. Somewhat shockingly, it put out new stuff. You might've missed out on some cool releases—dodging shards of glass and balls of fire can be distracting. So, we're going to help you play catchup on the best of the best in gadgetry. Some of these picks are pricey, but I made sure I didn't flood you with tech from your wildest dreams; none of that "you should buy a see-through glass TV for $30K" nonsense. Other picks are well within a reasonable range. Check out Esquire's 50 Gadget Award winners below.
 'The 'Godfather Part III' Is Not Nearly As Bad As We Remember For some mysterious reason Chris Nashawaty can't explain, the conventional pop-culture wisdom on The Godfather: Part III is that it's a bad movie. It's not. It may be lacking in greatness if you're measuring it against the first two chapters in the series. But by any other reasonable metric, it's actually pretty damn good—certainly way better than its tarnished reputation would have you believe. Now, on the heels of Coppola's recent restorations of Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club, he's finally been given permission by the new administration at Paramount to return to The Godfather: Part III for another Do Over, editing shears in hand. And while Nashawaty is usually pretty skeptical about these sorts of big, splashy nip-and-tuck facelifts (more often than not, they're little more than craven excuses to peddle a few thousand anniversary Blu-rays), it turns out that there actually was a better movie than the Godfather: Part III we saw the first time around 30 years ago.  Nick Kroll Knows We're All at Least a Little Bit Disgusting Though Big Mouth, Nick Kroll's animated Netflix series with three seasons under its belt, never shied away from getting real—tackling modern-day pre-pubescent concerns like code-switching, body odor, divorce, and popularity—its new season takes the wildest, most personal swings yet. It's a tricky balancing act to find a middle ground between laugh-out-loud 9/11 jokes (with a punchline you won't see coming) and ten episodes that focus on stress, self-doubt, and the inner saboteurs that live within each of us. But "because the show is about change, it doesn't feel like we're constantly revisiting the same jokes for people," Kroll told Brennan Carley over Zoom late last month. "Our characters can learn things and actually evolve." But Kroll has evolved over the course of Big Mouth's run, too. "My personal barometer is: it always has to be funny, or it feels preachy," he says of tackling the challenges the show faced. "But it can never be funny at the expense of being clear about who the target is, and what the joke is that we're telling." And this year, that fine line moved further than it ever had before.
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Sunday, December 06, 2020
The $2 Billion Mall Rats
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