Michael Lewis: The End Of Wall Street's Boom

[Tomppa85]

Tämä on yksi parhaiten kirjoitetuista artikkeleista, mitä olen lukenut nykyisestä finanssikriisistä. Kirjoittaja on Michael Lewis, joka on kirjoittanut kuuluisan kirjan Liar's Pokerin. Kannattaa lukea! (Sekä artikkeli että kirja)

Avasin uuden ketjun tälle, koska en halunnut että tämä hautautuisi jonkun isomman sisään.

Pari lainausta:

http://www.portfolio.com/news-marke...folio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

 

[Thornton]

Hieno kirjoitus, jossa osoitettiin hyvin nykyisen kriisin perimmäiset syyt.

Valitettavan harvoilla oli sellainen ymmärrys kansantaloudesta ja näistä uusista finanssimarkkinoiden instrumenteista, että osasivat ennustaa tulevan kriisin ja sen laajuuden.
Ja ne ketkä ennustivat, niitä ei kuunneltu.

Pari hyvää videota aiheeseen liittyen:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZapLpNBEAoE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c87nUOT17gU