Much of what has been going on is nothing less than swindles, frauds, cons and buncos

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

and I think there needs to be some righteous outrage pointed at both the perpetrators and the asleep at the wheel regulators and the auditors who let them get away with this crap.

Make no mistake, some people were wheeling barrels of cash out the doors of these companies while they were pulling off these scams. What exactly has the SEC been doing these last eight years?!

Credit default swaps? Speculation with no collateral based on the performance of third parties? Who decided that was an accepted and responsible practice? I heard one very chilling description that said that there were more poker chips on the table than there was money in the world.

I think the level of what has been happening warrants criminal proceedings. There will be shareholder lawsuits, as there should be. People at the top skimmed off all the real assets and collateral in the form of bloated salaries and bonuses and left the shareholders with the fake and worthless overvalued paper assets. Not to mention poisoning and contaminating the world financial markets with their worthless scrip.

[Philosoraptor]

1. True, but these people wear real nice suits & are well connected.

So they have the right to rip us off, hell, we're not stopping them.

[deminks]

3. That's just what I was thinking- it's done in a $3000 suit,

so it's ok. You can't wear that in prison. /sarcasm off.

[screembloodymurder]

2. You're right. The military needs to pick up GWB.

Where the fuck are they?

[dgibby]

4. In Iraq

In Iraq,getting their asses blown off in Dubya's illegal, immoral war!:mad:

[HamdenRice]

5. No they weren't. Billionaires don't lose billions in schemes to defraud the public

If we can't wrap our minds around this, we won't understand the catastrophic depths of the crisis. This crisis is not caused by frauds, cons or schemes. It was caused by massive miscalculations.

No one in finance saw this coming until it was too late to unwind it.

Trust me, Lehman and Bear Stearns management did not set out to lose billions of their own money.

[bvar22]

6. Whose money did they lose?

Only the SUCKERS will be left holding the bag.

This has been coming for a while.
Deregulation is a SCAM by design. A HUGE Smash & Grab that was blueprinted under Reagan (S&L Deregulation Scam), Fine Tuned and expanded under Clinton (Energy, Communications, Banking/Lending), and completed under Bush*.....by design.

Those on the inside have already cashed out.
Welcome Back to the Gilded Age.
The RICH will be able to live like KINGS again.


Great line from The Rounders:
"If you can't spot the sucker sitting at the (Poker) table, its YOU".

[HamdenRice]

8. They're own

The lost other people's money, but they also lost their own. Billionaires don't lose their billions intentionally.

[bvar22]

14. Just like Kenny Boy Lay "lost" all his money.....

...when Enron collapsed?

If you believe that, I've got a bridge in Alaska.....

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

7. miscalculations like those made at the craps tables in Vegas

Insane leverage compounded by complete abrogation of fiscal sanity and fiduciary duties and rigorous accounting and underwriting and probable mistatement of risk. (To be clear, I am not speaking of any specific company but of the sector overall)

They gambled. They lost. But while they were gambling away the shareholders' capital, they were personally bringing home the swag from the bloated salaries and outsized bonuses they were awarded based on the ILLUSION of profit they were creating.

[HamdenRice]

9. No, it's not like craps. More like Nobel level mathematics.

One of the most damaging ideas that has gripped the liberal blogosphere is that what they were doing was "just gambling." Nope, they hired some of the best mathematicians in the world to model these transactions and they lost.

The point isn't to defend them, but you won't understand the depths of the crisis unless you realize that the very best, most sophisticated predictions were wrong. That's how in the crapper we are.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

11. You know, I read a really interesting article somewhere once

about that very subject. I will attempt to find it and post it - About how they hired mathematicians to make prognostications on market activity and to create forecast models. It reminded me of hurricane modeling, taking the prevailing currents , predicted temps, etc. and trying to predict where the hurricane lands. And we know how accurate that can be.

Anyway, the article I read was actually very unflattering, because it made the point that the mathematicians did not have any real underlying understanding of finance, but only an understanding of modeling probability and statistics.

3points.

1. They probably would have had better long term results with fewer losses if they had just gone to the craps tables.

2. Remember the stock success predictor experiment where the monkeys throwing darts did better than the experts?

3. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

[Odin2005]

12. HamdenRice is right here. People too easily scream "conspiracy" when incompetence...

explains everything just fine. It seems that people find it psychologically more comforting to to blame and scapegoat other people when it's mindsets and impersonal forces are at work, that's why people believe conspiracy theories; something political philosopher Karl Popper talked about in his famous book The Open Society and It's Enemies when he described what he called the "conspiracy-based theory of society," a theory Popper then proceeded to eviscerate.

[JHB]

10. That's the Reagan/neoliberal/free marketeer/Friedman Legacy: "Entrepreneurship = Swindler"...

...especially in the FIRE sector: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.

Very little real innovation there that wasn't just to circumvent "outdated" protections against exactly what happened.

[earth mom]

13. I've long thought the stock market was a form of gambling. Just look at the NY stock exchange...

every time I see that place, I think of Vegas. It's got that flashy, gadgety look with lots of crazed people running around trying to make a buck.

It's EXACTLY like Vegas with it's winners and losers.

Guess who the losers are this time? Answer: The American People. :grr: