Don’t Hold Your Breath Waiting For an Apology [Editor’s Note: The views expressed here are solely those of Ross Kaplan, and do not represent Edina Realty, Berkshire Hathaway, or any other entity referenced.] Your company’s breathtaking recklessness, greed, and — above all — stupidity(!) blow a $200 billion hole in its balance sheet, threatening the global...Read More
Adding Fuel to the Fire — Then Buying Fire Insurance According to Margin Call — the most recent movie to tackle the Wall Street-authored financial bust — the honchos running the nation’s biggest investment banks realized too late that the market for mortgage-backed securities was going to collapse. So, literally overnight, they did a 180, dumping their...Read More
“Occupy Wall Street” Conundrum: What to Occupy One of my favorite political cartoons — from the 1970’s no less — shows a self-satisfied oil executive sitting behind a big desk, his feet up, smoking a cigar (I said it was from the ’70’s). “You want oil?,” he practically cackles (to no one in particular). “We own the wells.”...Read More
Post’s Pearlstein Gets It Very Wrong Much of [yesterday’s Senate] hearing focused on how Goldman went from having billions of dollars of exposure to the subprime mortgage market in the first half of 2006 to posting big profits from the implosion in that same market by the second half of 2007. The more benign way...Read More
Goldman Sachs & the 4 Not-So-Little PIIG’s Wall Street did not create Europe’s debt problem. But bankers enabled Greece and others to borrow beyond their means, in deals that were perfectly legal. –“Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis“; The New York Times(2/14/2010) We all know the basic story line by now....Read More
Hoist by Our Own Petard (Bailout Money) Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. –Depression-era Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon Andrew Mellon, President Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, would have known what to do about AIG: liquidate it. Doing so a year ago would have spared taxpayers the spectacle (obscenity, really) of bailed-out TARP...Read More
