This article in Institutional Investor about Jim Chanos published today includes the following statements about Fairfax:
One of Chanos’s few losing shorts that drew media criticism was an ugly battle with Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial. Flame-throwing journalist Matt Taibbi criticized the short-sellers in his book
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, saying that hedge fund moguls Dan Loeb and Steve Cohen, among others, had followed Chanos’s lead and ganged up to drive down the shares of Fairfax. (The company sued the hedge fund managers in a New Jersey court, but the case against Kynikos was eventually thrown out on jurisdictional grounds, with Fairfax losing its final appeal last year.)
The short-sellers argued that Fairfax was underreserved, which turned out to be true. But ultimately it didn’t matter, as Fairfax made up for its deficiencies with a timely subprime short during the financial crisis.
Chanos concedes that the critics had one good argument: Short-sellers had hired a third-party researcher, Spyro Contogouris, who turned out to be a “bad guy” who engaged in unsavory behavior that confirmed the public’s worst suspicions of short-sellers. “As soon as we found that out,” Chanos says, “we fired him.”
Maybe there's nothing new here, but it is yet another reference.
