dimelab dimelab: shrinking the gap between talk and action.

David Fiderer Topic in The Credit Debacle Catalog

zero hedge - on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero Fri 2010-07-16 14:41 EDT

Guest Post: Why Goldman Could Pull It Off

The weaknesses in the S.E.C.'s case against Goldman were always obvious. At the end of the day, an investor who bought Abacus 2007 AC-1 was buying a static portfolio of risks....If you were a sophisticated investor who had done his due diligence, you didn't need to be told that the deal was designed to fail...If you actually reviewed the performance of mortgage backed securities held by the CDO, and understood how cash flow waterfalls and delinquency triggers worked, then you could see that subordinate tranches being insured for the benefit of Goldman were already worthless when the CDO closed. You could also figure out that the rating agencies had deliberately delayed announcing downgrades of the RMBS within the CDO, in order to keep the markets and the deal flow moving...The risk to Goldman was that more of its dirty laundry would be exposed...[but] the S.E.C. shows little appetite for digging deeper, especially since its new COO of the Enforcement Division is a 30-year-old kid from Goldman.

dropped; Goldman; Guest Post; long; pull; survival rate; Timeline; zero; Zero Hedge.

zero hedge Wed 2010-05-19 11:37 EDT

Guest Post: Goldman's CDOs Had Nothing to Do With the Real Estate Bubble

If Goldman Sachs wanted to reduce its exposure to subprime mortgage investments, why didn't it simply sell the assets it owned? Two reasons: First, those large sales would have sent a signal that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and thereby pushed prices down further. That's how supply and demand normally works. Second, Goldman professed to be market maker, which uses its trading book to instill confidence. It ostensibly bought, sold and inventoried mortgage securities to provide stability and liquidity to the marketplace. Of course, we now know that such market confidence was entirely misplaced. To sidestep these issues, Goldman and other major banks found a solution that subverted the laws of supply and demand, and escaped the price discovery of a transparent marketplace. They fabricated synthetic CDOs, such as Abacus 2007 AC-1. These toxic assets, invented out of thin air, made the meltdown worse than it otherwise would have been...

Goldman's CDOs; Guest Post; real estate bubble; Zero Hedge.

zero hedge Wed 2010-02-03 20:00 EST

AIG: Collusion Of Epic Proportions Between Goldman's US Treasury Branch And Goldman Sachs Proper

Must read piece from David Fiderer, first published on Huffington Post How Paulson's People Colluded With Goldman To Destroy AIG And Get A Backdoor Bailout

AIG; collusion; epic proportions; Goldman Sachs Proper; Goldman's; Treasury Branch; Zero Hedge.