The Big Bluff: Wall Street Traders Burn Down The House
The Big Bluff: Wall Street Traders Burn Down The House
Greed is no longer Good.
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Wall Street Traders Burn Down Your House. 21st Century finance proves that Greed is no longer Good #financialreform http://bit.ly/esG0rY
Summary
Michael Lewis' The Big Short depicts some of the financial crisis' worst villians, CDS traders, as heroes. Good Business Blogger Monika Mitchell reveals that in 2011: greed is no longer good.
Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 2:15pm
Lately I have been hearing a lot about how Wall Street mortgage market makers who brought the global economies to their knees were “stupid.” MIT Quants, Berkeley physicists, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton MBA’s, we are told, were completely clueless about the upcoming housing collapse. We are supposed to believe that these physics and stochastic calculus majors did not understand that what goes up must come down.
At the 92 Street Y in New York last week, Michael Lewis, the prolific author of “The Big Short” (out in paperback this month), claimed to NPR’s engaging host Ira Glass that most guys on Wall Street did not see the downturn in housing coming. He further declared that only 10-20 people in the whole industry saw the upcoming crisis – the rest are either “fools or crooks.” The handful of credit default swap (CDS) traders aka “short-sellers” in his book are his “heroes.” “I like these guys,” he announced. “I want the reader to like them too.”
Well, we do like them – as much as we can like people who escalated the collapse of the U.S. financial system and were on the receiving end of hundreds of millions of dollars of government bailout monies. Remember AIG? They were one of the losers on the other side of the trades from Lewis’ “heroes.” I guess that means you and I lost that bet.
Keywords: Responsible Business & Employee Engagement | A.I.G. bailout | Financial Crisis | Greg Lippman | John Paulson | Michael Lewis | Steve Eisman | The Big Short | Wall Street traders | credit default swaps | naked credit default swaps
