"Money, Power and Wall Street" - HUGE!!

[g5000]

Mac, they go all the way back to BISTRO, although they don't mention it specifically by name. Even further back than that. They even extensively interview two of the 20-somethings at JP Morgan who invented it and then watched their creation get turned into a monster by other firms who had no idea what they were doing.

It really is well done.

My concern is that they try to point all the blame in one simplistic direction (as "Too Big to Fail" did) instead of painting the big picture. So they illustrate that there were many pieces, many villians (including the consumer) in this? If so, then yeah, I'll try to check it out.

.

I have watched only the first hour, but it is pretty clear they are constructing all of the pieces. In the first hour, they went into the creation story of CDS and CDOs. There also touched on how the instruments were gamed and given AAA by the ratings agencies.

And they went into the naivete of the investors who were buying the toxic tranches.

While they don't accent it enough, they do explain how loose credit became as the result of the mistaken belief that risk was being eliminated through derivatives. And so the underwriting laws of the Universe were being chucked out the window.

One of the JP Morgan women explains how they created CDOs for business loans because they had a long credit history of such loans, and she bemoans how there was no such history for retail home loans and that is why they hesitated to get in on that market while the rest were running wild.

Frontline also gets major Cool points from me because they feature [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Traders-Guns-Money-derivatives-Financial/dp/0273731963/ref=la_B0045AX9M2_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336066829&sr=1-2]Satyajit Das[/ame] in the first hour quite a bit.

It is a very impressive effort, and I look forward to watching the remaining three hours.

 

[bucs90]

Ah.........I love seeing the left's obsessive envy of those who are wealthier, smarter and more attractive than they are.

 

[Mac1958]

Mac, they go all the way back to BISTRO, although they don't mention it specifically by name. Even further back than that. They even extensively interview two of the 20-somethings at JP Morgan who invented it and then watched their creation get turned into a monster by other firms who had no idea what they were doing.

It really is well done.

My concern is that they try to point all the blame in one simplistic direction (as "Too Big to Fail" did) instead of painting the big picture. So they illustrate that there were many pieces, many villians (including the consumer) in this? If so, then yeah, I'll try to check it out.

.

I have watched only the first hour, but it is pretty clear they are constructing all of the pieces. In the first hour, they went into the creation story of CDS and CDOs. There also touched on how the instruments were gamed and given AAA by the ratings agencies.

And they went into the naivete of the investors who were buying the toxic tranches.

While they don't accent it enough, they do explain how loose credit became as the result of the mistaken belief that risk was being eliminated through derivatives. And so the underwriting laws of the Universe were being chucked out the window.

One of the JP Morgan women explains how they created CDOs for business loans because they had a long credit history of such loans, and she bemoans how there was no such history for retail home loans and that is why they hesitated to get in on that market while the rest were running wild.

Frontline also gets major Cool points from me because they feature [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Traders-Guns-Money-derivatives-Financial/dp/0273731963/ref=la_B0045AX9M2_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336066829&sr=1-2]Satyajit Das[/ame] in the first hour quite a bit.

It is a very impressive effort, and I look forward to watching the remaining three hours.

Yup. The fact that they didn't make it a "docu-drama" probably helps tons.

The quality of the CDO's pretty much went into the shitter immediately. I'd like to know how the ratings agencies got away with what they did. I'd also like to know how AIG got away with writing all those CDS's.

I think any program that doesn't address the consumer and their behavior is not painting a full picture. But I'll check it out, maybe it does.

.

 

[g5000]

The quality of the CDO's pretty much went into the shitter immediately. I'd like to know how the ratings agencies got away with what they did. I'd also like to know how AIG got away with writing all those CDS's.

They go into that. You have to remember this is a film for the layman, but they do have a guy on there who explains that CDS were a type of insurance that evaded insurance regulations in order to avoid setting aside capital to cover losses when writing a CDS. He then explains those firms selling CDS were not setting aside ANY capital to cover losses. It was a completely unregulated market.

They also do one helluva job explaining that these were all OTC instruments, which allowed for massive spreads since the customers were not buying these products on open exchanges where a pricepoint could be determined. And that was what the game was all about. The big spreads that far exceeded those in equity and bond derivatives trading.

I think the ratings agencies got away with what they did because they had no idea what these things were and just took the word of the financial institutions as to their safety. "Hey, we sold off the risk to some German banks, so we're golden."

This goes back to BISTRO. Except JP Morgan's risk layoff argument was entirely legitimate for the reasons I mentioned above. You have to remember this was an entirely new concept. The ratings agencies just assumed the model for a retail mortgage CDO worked the same way as BISTRO. Techically it did, but there is an underlying assumption the amount of risk in a mortgage CDO is identical to the risk in a blue chip corporate CDO. And that is where they went drastically wrong.

I think any program that doesn't address the consumer and their behavior is not painting a full picture. But I'll check it out, maybe it does.

It does not get into the borrowers in the first hour. Maybe in the following three hours it does.

But I have to tell you, as time has gone on, I am less and less inclined to put much onus on the borrowers. Yes, you are an idiot if you are buying a $300,000 house on a $35,000 income. But when a banker and a borrower are sitting across the table from each other, and one has years of financial training, experience and acumen, while the other is ignorant in all matters fiduciary, which one bears the most responsibility?

It is not a relationship of equals. It's like a 40 year old pedophile seducing a child. The kid doesn't stand a chance.

And if the broker is going to sell the loan up the food chain before the ink is even dry, there is absolutely nothing to stop him from taking candy from babies for risk-free massive profit.

 

[KissMy]

Just remember these words when you hear Politicians & Wallstreet talking in code.

- Risk Spreading = Making Risk Systemic. Not safe like Obama & Frank Raines said it should.

- Loosening Credit Standards = Creating money out of thin air by creating junk bonds. Not as Clinton & Frank Raines describes it. Discrimination because the number of minority and low income home owners are just "a notch below what our current underwriting has required".

- Financial Genius / Alchemy = Dreaming up a scheme to rate those bad credit junk bonds as AAA so we can sell them to suckers. (ie: CDO, CDS, SPV, SPE, etc.)

These are all the same crime as painting bars of lead gold & selling them as gold.

 

[Mac1958]

The quality of the CDO's pretty much went into the shitter immediately. I'd like to know how the ratings agencies got away with what they did. I'd also like to know how AIG got away with writing all those CDS's.

They go into that. You have to remember this is a film for the layman, but they do have a guy on there who explains that CDS were a type of insurance that evaded insurance regulations in order to avoid setting aside capital to cover losses when writing a CDS. He then explains those firms selling CDS were not setting aside ANY capital to cover losses. It was a completely unregulated market.

They also do one helluva job explaining that these were all OTC instruments, which allowed for massive spreads since the customers were not buying these products on open exchanges where a pricepoint could be determined. And that was what the game was all about. The big spreads that far exceeded those in equity and bond derivatives trading.

I think the ratings agencies got away with what they did because they had no idea what these things were and just took the word of the financial institutions as to their safety. "Hey, we sold off the risk to some German banks, so we're golden."

This goes back to BISTRO. Except JP Morgan's risk layoff argument was entirely legitimate for the reasons I mentioned above. You have to remember this was an entirely new concept. The ratings agencies just assumed the model for a retail mortgage CDO worked the same way as BISTRO. Techically it did, but there is an underlying assumption the amount of risk in a mortgage CDO is identical to the risk in a blue chip corporate CDO. And that is where they went drastically wrong.

I think any program that doesn't address the consumer and their behavior is not painting a full picture. But I'll check it out, maybe it does.

It does not get into the borrowers in the first hour. Maybe in the following three hours it does.

But I have to tell you, as time has gone on, I am less and less inclined to put much onus on the borrowers. Yes, you are an idiot if you are buying a $300,000 house on a $35,000 income. But when a banker and a borrower are sitting across the table from each other, and one has years of financial training, experience and acumen, while the other is ignorant in all matters fiduciary, which one bears the most responsibility?

It is not a relationship of equals. It's like a 40 year old pedophile seducing a child. The kid doesn't stand a chance.

And if the broker is going to sell the loan up the food chain before the ink is even dry, there is absolutely nothing to stop him from taking candy from babies for risk-free massive profit.

Good stuff, thanks very much. I struggle with the issue of consumer as victim. Yes, there sure as hell were/are predatory bastards across the entire financial services spectrum (among others), and we need effective and flexible regulation and enforcement to nail their ass (note: "more" regulation does not necessarily mean "better" regulation - something I scream at my OSJ regularly, and two weeks ago during an audit).

At the same time, I also think that we have a deep cultural problem with money and spending. No one makes people WANT to mortgage that home to pay for the big screen and to pay off the credit cards, only to run them back up. That, to me, is a mixture of personal irresponibility and old-fashioned greed. With as much information as there is out there, no one can claim to be ignorant of fundamental household finances.

Anyway, thanks again, I'll try to see it.

.

 

[thereisnospoon]

It's a tough balancing act, and we sure as hell don't have it figured out yet.

Not hardly. I spent 18 years writing mortgage loans. And we had a fine system in place when it was run by true mortgage bankers.

As soon as investment houses were permitted to write, fund and sell mortgage loans, all the BS loans started hitting the streets.

Now what was the legislative act that permitted this change?

And to think that people in the industry did not know what was going to happen is crazy.
I and some of my cohorts would bet on which month a loan would go into default.
Any decent underwriter or loan officer KNEW that we were creating a disaster. The ONLY reason it was allowed to continue is because of the money being made and with the sale of MBS, the risk of these bad loans could be passed on to an un suspecting investor.
Thanks to the credit rating agencies.

BTW, sub prime loans used to serve a useful purpose in the mortgage market. A niche if you will. When sub prime loans became the norm the end was near. I always wrote what was considered "A" paper loans and got out as the sub prime collapse was near. Besides that, as the end neared you couldn't find anything but crummy borrowers getting sub prime loans.

But to think the industry did not know what they were doing is crazy. They knew. They just didn't care. Greed was king. You had loan officers making 200k a year that had never made over 50. That will make you greedy. Managers making 500k a year. The amount of money being made was astounding.

But surely the right wing knows it was all Barney Frank's fault.

As soon as investment houses were permitted to write, fund and sell mortgage loans, all the BS loans started hitting the streets.

I know, that investment bank, Countrywide, really screwed the pooch.

It's deeper than that.... Bank of America bought Countrywide....Then Wachovia bought Golden West Financial. Both companies were sub prime boiler room lenders that sold a lot of bad paper. Many of those loans were packaged together and sold as securities which were supposedly back by US Treasuries. They were all under the delusion that the properties would never lose value.
The whole thing started with the federal government insisting banks lend to previously unqualified borrowers. .
Bottom line. The federal government interfered with the housing/real estate market and THAT crashed the economy.

 

[Troubadour]

"Money, power, and Wall Street."

Is this a list of Romney's campaign backers?

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

"Money, power, and Wall Street."

Is this a list of Romney's campaign backers?

Is this a list of Obama's campaign backers?

 

[Darkwind]

I suppose you think that Michael Moore is a genius too.....

Hmm..


Wait....Micheal? Is that you?

 

[Mr. Shaman]

The cause the financial meltdown is not covered in Money Power & Wallstreet. They are only covering the bailout. It also was not just republicans. Bill Clinton and many prominent democrats pushed for the killing of "Glass Steagall". Bill Clinton personally signed all the laws that deregulated Wallstreet & turned it into a gambling casino that raises prices on citizens & steals their savings.

Who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act?

Bill Clinton Admits "I Was Wrong"

Thanks for the accurate historical facts insead of Shaman's regurgitated after the fact spin by PBS.

what was the name of that ACT this stuff talks about?


Gramm leach biliely act.


It is named after Phil Gramm who wrote it and as soon as it passed he left congress and was given a big ticket job at UBS bank.


There were reasons Clinton signed the bill.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKKvMJeBBSA]Q&A: Leslie & Andrew Cockburn - YouTube[/ame]

See: 9:00 thru 12:00​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

Mac, they go all the way back to BISTRO, although they don't mention it specifically by name. Even further back than that. They even extensively interview two of the 20-somethings at JP Morgan who invented it and then watched their creation get turned into a monster by other firms who had no idea what they were doing.

It really is well done.

My concern is that they try to point all the blame in one simplistic direction (as "Too Big to Fail" did) instead of painting the big picture. So they illustrate that there were many pieces, many villians (including the consumer) in this? If so, then yeah, I'll try to check it out.

Saddle-UP, CHICKENSHIT!!!!

​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

Ah.........I love seeing the left's obsessive envy of those who are wealthier, smarter and more attractive than they are.

Yeah.....they surely did.....

....PUNK YOU TEABAGGER CLOWNS!!!!

 

[Mr. Shaman]

My concern is that they try to point all the blame in one simplistic direction (as "Too Big to Fail" did) instead of painting the big picture. So they illustrate that there were many pieces, many villians (including the consumer) in this? If so, then yeah, I'll try to check it out.

.

I have watched only the first hour, but it is pretty clear they are constructing all of the pieces. In the first hour, they went into the creation story of CDS and CDOs. There also touched on how the instruments were gamed and given AAA by the ratings agencies.

And they went into the naivete of the investors who were buying the toxic tranches.

While they don't accent it enough, they do explain how loose credit became as the result of the mistaken belief that risk was being eliminated through derivatives. And so the underwriting laws of the Universe were being chucked out the window.

One of the JP Morgan women explains how they created CDOs for business loans because they had a long credit history of such loans, and she bemoans how there was no such history for retail home loans and that is why they hesitated to get in on that market while the rest were running wild.

Frontline also gets major Cool points from me because they feature [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Traders-Guns-Money-derivatives-Financial/dp/0273731963/ref=la_B0045AX9M2_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336066829&sr=1-2]Satyajit Das[/ame] in the first hour quite a bit.

It is a very impressive effort, and I look forward to watching the remaining three hours.

I'd like to know how the ratings agencies got away with what they did.

You've gotta spend a little-less-time with FAUX Noise.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNBctwAsu48]PBS NOW | Credit and Credibility part 1 - YouTube[/ame]
*
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2iqmywyiQI]PBS NOW | Credit and Credibility part 2 - YouTube[/ame]
*
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaUoa3686RM]PBS NOW | Credit and Credibility part 3 - YouTube[/ame]​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

I suppose you think that Michael Moore is a genius too.....

Hmm..


Wait....Micheal? Is that you?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnserZOf1-4]Sicko - Chilling Excerpt by Tony Benn - YouTube[/ame]
*
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ1lPPTPSR4]SiCKO - Canadian Waiting Room Scene - YouTube[/ame]
*
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOZmvaFfjtk]Sicko: Michael Moore interviews a Doctor in UK - YouTube[/ame]​

 

[FireFly]

Thanks for the accurate historical facts insead of Shaman's regurgitated after the fact spin by PBS.

what was the name of that ACT this stuff talks about?


Gramm leach biliely act.


It is named after Phil Gramm who wrote it and as soon as it passed he left congress and was given a big ticket job at UBS bank.


There were reasons Clinton signed the bill.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKKvMJeBBSA]Q&A: Leslie & Andrew Cockburn - YouTube[/ame]

See: 9:00 thru 12:00​

Clinton was pushing to do away with Glass Steagall & negociating with Gramm for over 5 years before he signed that bill into law. Anyone with half a brain knows Clinton knew exactly what he was doing when he signed that bill into law. Now you twerps are trying to spin it saying Gramm slid a bill in & Clinton signed it into law without knowing.

You idiots have zero credibility.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

what was the name of that ACT this stuff talks about?


Gramm leach biliely act.


It is named after Phil Gramm who wrote it and as soon as it passed he left congress and was given a big ticket job at UBS bank.


There were reasons Clinton signed the bill.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKKvMJeBBSA]Q&A: Leslie & Andrew Cockburn - YouTube[/ame]

See: 9:00 thru 12:00​

Clinton was pushing to do away with Glass Steagall & negociating with Gramm for over 5 years before he signed that bill into law. Anyone with half a brain knows Clinton knew exactly what he was doing when he signed that bill into law. Now you twerps are trying to spin it saying Gramm slid a bill in......

It's called a "rider", Skippy......what politicians do when they CAN'T get legislation passed, on it's own merits.

Stupid Teabaggers​

 

[FireFly]

Q&A: Leslie & Andrew Cockburn - YouTube

See: 9:00 thru 12:00​

Clinton was pushing to do away with Glass Steagall & negociating with Gramm for over 5 years before he signed that bill into law. Anyone with half a brain knows Clinton knew exactly what he was doing when he signed that bill into law. Now you twerps are trying to spin it saying Gramm slid a bill in & Clinton signed it into law without knowing.

You idiots have zero credibility.

It's called a "rider", Skippy......what politicians do when they CAN'T get legislation passed, on it's own merits.

Stupid Teabaggers​

I noticed you edited out ...& Clinton signed it into law without knowing. I guess you wanted to give Clinton a pass on that. Why can't you address the issue?

Could it be that Clinton & the democrats agreed but did not want everyone to know they were for it???? - Hell YEESSS!!!! Bill Clinton & prominent Democrats were all for it & had been in negotiations with Gramm for 5 years before they passed & signed it into law.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

Clinton was pushing to do away with Glass Steagall & negociating with Gramm for over 5 years before he signed that bill into law. Anyone with half a brain knows Clinton knew exactly what he was doing when he signed that bill into law. Now you twerps are trying to spin it saying Gramm slid a bill in & Clinton signed it into law without knowing.

You idiots have zero credibility.

It's called a "rider", Skippy......what politicians do when they CAN'T get legislation passed, on it's own merits.

Stupid Teabaggers​

I noticed you edited out ...& Clinton signed it into law without knowing. I guess you wanted to give Clinton a pass on that.

....And, you forgot to mention Gramm added this hu$tle to the congressional-record....as if he'd spoken to the issue, in Congress!!

How transparent.

I guess your boy.....

.....McBush.....

....hadn't heard-about-it.

(Yeah....whatta shocker.)

 

[Mr. Shaman]

"Money, Power and Wall Street" - HUGE!!

"Sober, thoughtful -- this is explanatory journalism at its best."​

​