Kyle Bass

J. Kyle Bass (born September 7, 1969) is an American hedge fund manager. He is the founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management, L.P., a Dallas-based hedge fund focused on global events. In 2008, Bass successfully predicted and effectively bet against the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis by purchasing credit default swaps on subprime securities which, in turn, increased in value when the real estate bubble burst. Despite his early success in predicting subprime mortgages, he has received criticism for subsequent poor performance of investments. Bass has made prominent bets based on predictions of debt crisis in Japan and European sovereign debt, and shorted the Chinese yuan premised on a predicted collapse in the Chinese banking system. His fund has also challenged patents held by drug companies and shorted their stocks. His Japanese and European strategies have not been major successes and the Chinese yuan short led to severe losses for his fund in 2017. The drug patent challenge campaign fizzled after several legal setbacks. Bass is known as a staunch rhetorical critic of the Communist Party of China and its policies. However, financial reports filed with the Securities Exchange Commission show that he has accepted substantial investment capital in two of his investment funds from at least one technology company headquartered in China.