They began to dance in celebration, but are quickly reprimanded by their mentor, Ben Ricket, who was portrayed by Brad Pitt.

Ben: Do you even know what you just did? Charlie: Yeah. We made the deal of our careers. Ben: You just bet against the American economy. If we’re right it means people lose homes, jobs, retirement savings, pensions. These aren’t just numbers. For every point unemployment goes up, 40 thousand people die. Did you know that? Jaime: We were just excited. Ben: Just don’t fucking dance. Okay?

Several characters in The Big Short bet against housing derivatives, made hundreds of millions, and nevertheless feel furious at the system for all the innocent people made to suffer by the abhorrent, indefensible frauds perpetrated by Wall Street. They weren’t exactly hoping the economy would collapse. They were horrified by the idea. They just knew it would happen regardless of their savvy shorts.

The payoff was huge… yet, it was bittersweet.

I thought of those individuals, and their portrayal in the film, during an exchange about the financial crisis and its consequences. Trump didn’t short the housing market. He didn’t stand to gain a half-billion dollars in a crash, having never made the prescient trades required. But circa 2006, he was still rooting for a collapse, merely because then, housing prices would fall, and he could snap them up cheap.

Hillary Clinton raised the matter:

CLINTON: Well, let’s stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm. In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, “Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money.” Well, it did collapse.

Here is the actual 2006 quote, where Trump both expresses a desire for the housing market to collapse and explains why he doesn’t expect the impending crash:

Here is how Trump responded on Monday:

TRUMP: That’s called business, by the way. CLINTON: Nine million people — nine million people lost their jobs. Five million people lost their homes. And $13 trillion in family wealth was wiped out.

He didn’t say, “I never expected it to be as bad as it was, and of course, when I saw how many families wound up suffering, I wished that it never would’ve happened.”

He said, “that’s called business.”

Is it? There were businessmen who behaved better.

Buying real estate at post-crash prices is business. And there isn’t anything wrong with it. But “sorta hoping” for a war so that you can sell bullets, or a fire so you can collect on the insurance, or a housing bust to scoop up foreclosed homes, seems like more than “just business.” The last one seems like the sort of thing one might forgive in a person too young to know better, trying to buy their first house or start building a fortune. But rooting for the collapse of the American housing market in your sixties, fully aware of the implications, when you already have more wealth than you’ll ever need, because you can use your spare cash to pad your billions?