Is the Fed Repeating Wall Street’s Sins? Joe Nocera: At a certain point, Wall Street ran out of clients to sell [securitized debt] to. So the only way it could keep the machine going was to buy it themselves. Jon Stewart: So, they infected themselves. At the end, they themselves became vampires. [Which suggests] a...Read More
“We ALL Caused This Mess??” Hardly. Put me in the camp that says, without an accurate diagnosis, it’s not possible to cure our current economic mess. So, here are two competing narratives explaining how we got to this juncture, both courtesy of Les Leopold (thanks to Ned Krahl for forwarding the Leopold piece): Narrative #1:...Read More
Voiding Credit Default Swaps In a book stuffed with scathing insights and blockbuster revelations, here’s perhaps the biggest one (courtesy of Michael Lewis, writing in The Big Short): The reason Citigroup (amongst others) is considered “Too Big Too Fail” isn’t because it holds over $1 trillion in ordinary Americans’ savings in their vaults. It’s not...Read More
