The line of thinking that underlies an investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is a challenge to conventional wisdom about the financial crisis. The prevailing view is that since credit ratings were one of the single biggest points of failure in the crisis, the ratings agencies were one of the biggest, if not […]
Read more...Frank Partnoy, derivatives salesman turned law professor, took an ill fated star turn in the Financial Times today. In a comment titled, “Goldman is wrong target for official censure,” he writes (among other things): “Goldman is not to blame for the financial crisis,” a straw man if I ever saw one. I hate to say […]
Read more...A lot of people are still feeling very bruised by last Friday’s market actions (Felix Salmon went as far as ordering all retail investors to get out of the pool). A message from a reader with ample trading desk experience: BTW, hope you didn’t have any sell-stops yesterday, WTF was that?!?!? I covered my SPY […]
Read more...By Buzz Potamkin, former studio executive and producer, in the biz for 40+ years, now a consultant Every investment in film is gambling. Schuyler Moore, April 22, 2010, testimony before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities Futures are a hedge against some event yet to come, representing the desire by a participant to […]
Read more...Would you believe the chairman of a financial firm who told you that he was going to be able to pay off his loans to you when: 1. The company was showing a not-negative net worth ONLY because it had marked down its loans on its accounting statements by 7.5%, even when the loan agreement […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive The Fed and its friends and enablers in power, most recently Rahm Emanuel, are fighting tooth and nail to beat back the Audit the Fed amendments to pending financial reform legislation. That’s unfortunate and misguided. Even a cursory inspection of the Fed’s disclosures […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The recent financial crisis has shown that the legal and regulatory steps that have been taken to provide information […]
Read more...But opacity, leverage, and moral hazard are not accidental byproducts of otherwise salutary innovations; they are the direct intent of the innovations. No one at the major capital markets firms was celebrated for creating markets to connect borrowers and savers transparently and with low risk. After all, efficient markets produce minimal profits. They were instead […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith Despite extensive credit crisis post mortems, many of the widely accepted explanations of what happened are at odds with facts on the ground. These superficial explanations are hard to dislodge because they tally with widely held beliefs about how the real estate and […]
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive The SEC’s complaint against Goldman Sachs on its Abacus 2007 AC1 transaction may have impact beyond just the facts in that particular deal. The case has touched off a firestorm of reaction across the globe now that a government enforcement agency has dared use words like […]
Read more...By Yves Smith and Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive Both the traditional media and the blogosphere have taken an almost obsessive interest in the suit the SEC filed against Goldman last week with regard to one of its synthetic real estate related CDOs, Abacus 2007 AC1. Goldman’s shares and the stock market […]
Read more...Things are suddenly getting very interesting… Readers may have taken note that the Treasury has launched a son of HAMP, its ineffective program to get banks to provide undertake mortgage modifications, called 2MP. As far as I can tell, 2MP is a farce. It is simply another back door way to recapitalize troubled banks. Mike […]
Read more...Enjoy! Below is a related discussion by Ann Rutledge of R&R Consulting, another structured credit expert:
Read more...Get this: insurance companies have long been very big institutional investors. They get cash from premiums and have to pay it out in the future. If they are in the property and casualty or health insurance business, there isn’t that long a time between premium payments and when the losses might show up, but other […]
Read more...The current number one non-fiction best seller, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, addresses the question “Who got it right? Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions from that perception?” It is hailed as meeting the usual Lewis high standards of engaging […]
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