James Chanos ( a Greek-American born 1958 in Milwaukee and graduate of Wylie E. Groves High School) is the president and founder of Kynikos Associates, a New York City investment company that is focused on short selling. He graduated from Yale in 1980. Kynikos (Greek for "cynic") is one of the few firms specializing in short selling that survived the bull market of the 1990s.
He rose to fame in the 1980s as a "short" - a short seller who had a knack of spotting stocks that he thought to be overvalued. Chanos focussed on the fundamentals before betting if a stock would tumble in value. He had the ability and willingness to do the in-depth research needed to expose slippery accounting - research that most Wall Street analysts had neither the training nor the motivation to do at the time.[citation needed]
He spent months researching a stock, and then took a large position for a long period of time.[citation needed] His work turned out to function like a whistle-blower's, exposing companies like Baldwin-United, Drexel Burnham, and more recently, the much famed Enron Corporation.
In October 2000, Chanos started investigating Enron Corporation. He examined their use of mark to model (cousin to mark-to-market) accounting , which, in Chanos' experience, results in management overstating earnings, as well as their low 7% return on capital investment.
Chanos became an early short seller of Enron as 2001 progressed, increased his short position as more information surfaced. When the Enron scandal was out in the open, Kynikos profited greatly and Chanos himself became somewhat of a mini-celebrity as a consequence of his early probe into Enron's problems. Had the thousands of investors listened to his information on Enron, they could probably have saved the millions they lost after the collapse of Enron.

Su jugada de 2007 contra las calificadoras de riesgo:

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By Richard Beales and Chrystia Freeland
Published: June 8 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 8 2007 03:00
Jim Chanos is the founder and president of Kynikos Associates, the world's largest dedicated short-selling hedge fund. He formed Kynikos in 1985 and has bet against companies involved in a string of corporate meltdowns, such as Commodore International and Tyco International.

Perhaps most celebrated of all was his early bet against Enron after being puzzled by the company's accounting a year before its collapse in late 2001. But even he admits: "We didn't think it was a fraud until very much near the end of the saga."

His recent public short picks include Macquarie Bank and Moody's Investors Service. Mr Chanos is also chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, a hedge fund lobby group.

Below are highlights from his video interview with FT.com.

There are few pure short sellers working right now. Is it a hard area to specialise in given the long-running bull market?

We like to say we're the embodiment of survivorship bias but I think it's a very difficult way to make a living on Wall Street, which is why a lot of people don't do it. I hope it remains a difficult way to make a living, because hopefully more people won't do it.

Having said that, I think that there has been winnowing out of the herd, if you will. It probably peaked out, in terms of dedicated short selling funds on Wall Street, in 1990. And then there was another culling of the herd in 2000.

What's your [short selling] case against Moody's?

Moody's is a simple story. It's structured finance. My argument against Moody's is that they are no longer a referee on the playing field, they are actually playing at this point. So although they are wearing an umpire's outfit, they have a Yankees hat on and I think that's the real problem, in that they are so entwined in the structured finance business.

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Cuando nos preguntamos, "que da comienzo a las crisis", siempre vean para el lado de los "cortos", ellos destapan la hoya siempre....