Michael Burry began worrying about the housing market in 2003, when lenders resurrected interest-only mortgages and loosened credit standards.

True: records from the time, such as Burry's Scion investor letters, his writings or posts from 2003 to 2004, or reliable reporting that cites them, show that by 2003 he was worried about the housing market, and lenders were reviving interest-only mortgages and loosening credit standards around 2003. Mostly true: the concern and its trigger are documented, but the date is off by about a year (late 2002 or 2004), or the interest-only revival is dated slightly differently. Mixed: his early concern is documented but tied to a clearly different trigger, or the interest-only revival happened in 2003 but his concern can only be dated substantially later. Mostly false: the evidence from the time shows his housing concerns started well after 2003 (2005 or later), and the claim backdates a real but later concern. False: records from the time show he was openly bullish on, or indifferent to, housing through 2003 to 2004, or interest-only mortgages were not revived or loosened at all around that period.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Betting on the Blind Side | Business | Vanity Fair Vanity Fair (excerpt of Michael Lewis, The Big Short) · April 2010

   “To one of his friends—a big-time East Coast professional investor—he wrote in May 2003 that the real-estate bubble was being driven ever higher by the irrational behavior of mortgage lenders who were extending easy credit.”

2. E2 Michael Burry - Bloomberg Transcript Bloomberg (interview transcript, hosted on Scribd) Own record

   “When rates collapsed, of course the ARMs exploded and in 2003 something curious had happened.”

3. E3 Michael Burry - Bloomberg Transcript Bloomberg (interview transcript, hosted on Scribd) Own record

   “I thought it was a little bit of a teaser rate mortgage I thought. But it didn’t concern me too much.”

4. E4 A Supervisor's Perspective on Mortgage Markets and Mortgage Lending Practices Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Governor Susan Schmidt Bies) · 14 June 2006

   “IOs and option ARMs are estimated to have accounted for almost one-third of all U.S. mortgage originations in 2005, compared with fewer than 10 percent in 2003.”

Michael Lewis's independent account (E1) reports that in May 2003 Burry wrote to an investor that mortgage lenders extending easy credit were pushing the real-estate bubble higher. That records both his housing concern and the loose-credit trigger in 2003. No evidence item states that interest-only mortgages were revived in 2003: Burry's own interview (E2) says only that "in 2003 something curious had happened" without naming the development, and E4 shows that interest-only and option ARM loans were fewer than 10 percent of originations in 2003 and almost one-third in 2005. The Federal Reserve speech (E4) shows only that interest-only and option ARM loans were under 10% of originations in 2003 and nearly a third by 2005, which fits a revival starting around then but does not date it exactly. The core claim is well supported, but the interest-only detail is only partly confirmed by independent evidence.