"How can a guy who can't speak English lie?"
An investor who went from the stock market to the bond market was like a small, furry creature raised on an island without predators removed to a pit full of pythons."Senior management's job is to pay people," he'd say. "If they fuck a hundred guys out of a hundred grand each, that's ten million more for them. They have four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, disgusted. If they hit happy, they've screwed up: They never want you happy. On the other hand, they don't want you so disgusted you quit. The sweet spot is somewhere between dissatisfied and disgusted."
At some point in between 1986 and 2006 a memo had gone out on Wall Street, saying that if you wanted to keep on getting rich shuffling bits of paper around to no obvious social purpose, you had better camouflage your true nature.
"They were doing it so that when the borrowers get to the end of the teaser rate period, they'd have to refinance, so the lenders can make more money off them."
There was no real reason that company had to be AIG; it could have been any triple-A-rated entity with a huge balance sheet. Berkshire Hathaway, for instance, or General Electric. AIG just got there first.
In a financial system that was rapidly generating complicated risks, AIG FP became a huge swallower of those risks. In the early days it must have seemed as if it was being paid to insure events extremely unlikely to occur, as it was. Its success bred imitators: Zurich Re FP, Swiss Re FP, Credit Suisse FP, Gen Re FP. ("Re" stands for Reinsurance.) All of these places were central to what happened in the last two decades; without them, the new risks being created would have had no place to hide and would have remained in full view of bank regulators.
In 1993, when Howard Sosin left, he took with him nearly $200 million, his share of what appeared to be a fantastic money machine.
Toward the end of 2005, Cassano [the head of AIGFP] promoted Al Frost, then went looking for someone to replace him as the ambassador to Wall Street's subprime-mortgage-bond desks. As a smart quant who understood abstruse securities, Gene Park was a likely candidate. That's when Park decided to examine more closely the loans that A.I.G. F.P. had insured. He suspected Joe Cassano didn't understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. He asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. He asked Al Frost, who had no clue, but then, his job was to sell, not to trade. "None of them knew," says one trader. Which sounds, in retrospect, incredible. But an entire financial system was premised on their not knowing--and paying them for their talent! [Emphasis added.]
ANDREW K. DAVILMAN CRD# 2006234 Currently employed by and regÉtered With the following Firm(s): J.V.B. FINANCIAL GROUP, LLC 1633 BROADWAY 28TH FLOOR NE-WYORK,NY 10019 CRD# 149758 Registered With this firm since: 04/15/2015 Report Summary for this Broker Finra This report summary provides an overview Of the broker's professional background and conduct. Additional information can be found in the detailed report. Broker Qualifications This broker is registered With: • I Self-Regulatory Organization • 3 Ll. S. states and territories This broker has passed: • O Principal/Supervisory Exams • 2 Industry/Product Exams • I State Securities Law Exam Registration History This broker was previously registered With the following securities fin(s): WINKLEVOSS INSURANCE AGENCY, LLC CRD# 39081 CT 01/2012 - 06/2013 GOLDMAN, SACHS & CO. CRD# 361 NEW YORK, NY 02/1994 - 01/2010 LEHMAN BROTHERS INC. CRD# 7506 NEW YORK, NY 11/1989 - 01/1994 Disclosure Events All individuals registered to sell securities or provide investment advice are required to disclose customer complaints and arbitrations, regulatory actions, employrnent terminations, bankruptcy filings, and criminal or civil judicial proceedings. Are there events disclosed about this broker? NO
The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.
LIBOR, other interest rate indexes
The LIBOR is among the most common of benchmark interest rate indexes used to make adjustments to adjustable rate mortgages. This page also lists some other less-common indexes.Read more: http://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/libor.aspx#ixzz4JaiZ6fTe Follow us: @Bankrate on Twitter | Bankrate on Facebook
so, to generate $1 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, Goldman Sachs did not need to originate $50 billion in home loans. They needed simply to entice Mike Burry, or some other market pessimist, to pick 100 different triple-B bonds and buy $10 million in credit default swaps on each of them. Once they had this package (a "synthetic CDO," it was called, which was the term of art for a CDO composed of nothing but credit default swaps), they'd take it over to Moody's and Standard & Poor's. "The ratings agencies didn't really have their own CDO model," says one former Goldman CDO trader. "The banks would send over their own model to Moody's and say, 'How does this look?'" Somehow, roughly 80 percent of what had been risky triple-B-rated bonds now looked like triple-A-rated bonds.
It seems less shocking if you understand how these CDOs were put together and sold. Take a few minutes and glance over the prospectus for Davis Square Funding VI, one of the dozens of CDOs structured by Goldman before the risk was laid off on AIG. You could spend all day studying the document, but you will never be able to answer the question, "What am I buying?" The document doesn't tell you. That's the point. It's evident in every aspect of this document and the offering circulars for most of the other CDOs. The business purpose, the essence of the deal, can be summarized in one word: obfuscation.
"If you're in
a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your
bosses to be mad at you."
When he brought this up at a meeting,
his reward was to be hauled into a separate room by Joe Cassano, who screamed at
him that he didn't know what he was talking about
from wikipedia
The Standard & Poor's Case–Shiller Home Price Indices are repeat-sales house price indicesfor the United States. There are multiple Case–Shiller home price indices: A national home price index, a 20-city composite index, a 10-city composite index, and twenty individual metro area indices. These indices are calculated and kept monthly by Standard & Poor's, with data points calculated for the time period of January 1987 through the present. The indices kept by Standard and Poor are normalized to have a value of 100 in January 2000. These Indices are based on original work by economists Karl Case and Robert Shiller, in which their team calculated the home price index back to 1890. That index is normalized to have 1890 have a value of 100. The Case–Shiller Index being kept on Robert Shiller's website (http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm) is updated quarterly. Due to the different set reference points, and perhaps calculation differences, the index numbers provided in each data set can be very different. For example, in 4th quarter 2013, the Standard and Poor 20 city index point was in the 160's, while the index point for 4th quarter on the Shiller data was in the 130's. Professor Robert Shiller claims in his book Irrational Exuberance that such a long series of home prices does not appear to have been published for any country.[1]
Long Beach Savings, wholly owned by Washington
Mutual, was a prime example of financial incontinence.
In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with
an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house
for $724,000.
"Guys who can't get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody's,"
as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.
Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven
figures a year, set out to coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the
highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans.
. A person with a FICO score of 550 was virtually certain to
default and should never have been lent money in the first place. But the hole in the
rating agencies' models enabled the loan to be made, as long as a borrower with a
FICO score of 680 could be found to offset the deadbeat,
" The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall
Street harvested his FICO score. "
Born: December 14, 1955 (age 60), Queens, New York City, NY
Spouse: Jenny Paulson (m. 2000)
Education: Harvard Business School (1980), More
" Paulson
had never encountered a market in which an investor could sell short 25 billion
dollars' worth of a stock or bond without causing its price to move, even crash. "And
we could have done fifty billion, if we'd wanted to."
Charlie Ledley--curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley--was odd in his belief that the best
way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street
believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.
"and he says to us, like he actually means it, 'I truly believe that our ratings will prove accurate.'" And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, 'What did you just say?'--as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him. "With all due respect, sir," said Vinny deferentially, as they left, "you're delusional." This wasn't Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody's. The aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And its CEO was being told he was either a fool or a crook, by Vincent Daniel, from Queens.
Once, he got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. "I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, he's dumb!' A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb!" They shorted Bank of America, along with UBS, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and a few others
In early 2007 Grant wrote a series of pieces suggesting that the rating agencies had abandoned their posts--that they were almost surely rating these CDOs without themselves knowing exactly what was inside them.
"Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,"
"and he says to us, like he actually means it, 'I truly believe that our ratings will prove accurate.'" And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, 'What did you just say?'--as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him. "With all due respect, sir," said Vinny deferentially, as they left, "you're delusional." This wasn't Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody's. The aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And its CEO was being told he was either a fool or a crook, by Vincent Daniel, from Queens.
Once, he got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. "I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, he's dumb!' A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb!" They shorted Bank of America, along with UBS, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and a few others
In early 2007 Grant wrote a series of pieces suggesting that the rating agencies had abandoned their posts--that they were almost surely rating these CDOs without themselves knowing exactly what was inside them.
"Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,"
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