Thu 2010-09-23 09:33 EDT

Bob Rubin Just Wants to Be Cuddled

Iris Mack

[2010-04-29]...It's October 2007. I've just finished my morning jog on beautiful, sun-drenched Miami Beach and I'm getting a smoothie and a pastry at my usual place, Epicure Market. The subprime mortgage crisis is heading into full-swing mode; Jim Cramer had just done his crazy thing on TV, and you can feel the sky starting to fall all around you -- and that's a literal thing in Miami, where the cranes stopped on a lot of half-finished skyscrapers, the type where a few years back you'd hear about people flipping condos three times before the project even broke ground. (If there's ever a time that I don't regret leaving finance, it's now.) Anyway, I'm in line for the checkout, and a very familiar looking guy gets in line behind me. It's one of those situations where I'm not sure if I eyed him or he eyed me first, but I noticed him shortly when I turned to the left to swipe my debit card. He was standing right behind me in the checkout line - only a few feet away. He looked very familiar and famous, and while that's no rarity in Miami, it is when you realize it's because the guy looks like the former Treasury Secretary -- but maybe no, he's maybe not tall enough? -- and then somehow you finally just blurt out, "Hey, you look just like Bob Rubin!"...

Bob Rubin Just Wants; cuddling.

zero hedge - on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero Wed 2010-08-25 10:47 EDT

Illinois Teachers' Retirement System Enters The Death Spiral: AIG Wannabe's Go-For-Broke Strategy Fails As Pension Fund Begins Liquidations

Two few months ago we disclosed how the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System (TRS) was doing all it can to become the next AIG. In addition to, or maybe precisely due to, its deplorable fundamental condition, which can be summarized as being 61% underfunded on its $33.7 billion in assets, with a performance record of down $4.4 billion in 2009 and 5% in 2008, the fund, courtesy of a detailed analysis by Alexandra Harris of the Medill Journalism school at Northwestern, was found to be on its way to trying to become a veritable self-made TBTF: as was described then, "TRS is largely on the risky side of the contracts, selling and writing OTC derivatives, including credit default swaps,..."

AIG Wannabe's Go; Broke Strategy Fails; Death Spiral; dropped; Illinois teacher; long; Pension Fund Begins Liquidations; Retirement System Enters; survival rate; Timeline; zero; Zero Hedge.

Sat 2010-08-07 20:18 EDT

Wall Street's Big Win | Rolling Stone Politics

Matt Taibbi

...Obama and the Democrats boasted that the bill is the "toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression" -- a claim that would maybe be more impressive if Congress had passed any financial reforms since the Great Depression, or at least any that didn't specifically involve radically undoing the Depression-era laws...What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America's financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy -- and then decided that it didn't have the stones to wipe out our country's one --dependably thriving profit center: theft...Dodd-Frank was never going to be a meaningful reform unless these two fateful Clinton-era laws -- commercial banks gambling with taxpayer money, and unregulated derivatives being traded in the dark -- were reversed...Republican and Democratic leaders were working together with industry insiders and deep-pocketed lobbyists to prevent rogue members like Merkley and Levin from effecting real change...Geithner acted almost like a liaison to the financial industry, pushing for Wall Street-friendly changes on everything...Without the Volcker rule and the --Lincoln rule, the final version of finance reform is like treating the opportunistic symptoms of AIDS without taking on the virus itself. In a sense, the failure of Congress to treat the disease is a tacit admission that it has no strategy for our economy going forward that doesn't involve continually inflating and reinflating speculative bubbles...

Rolling Stone political; Wall Street's Big Win.

billy blog Thu 2010-07-15 16:58 EDT

We have been here before ...

The daily rhetoric being used to promote fiscal austerity maybe couched in the urgency of the day but we have heard it all before. In this blog I just reflect on history a little to remind the reader that previous attempts to carve public net spending, based on the ``expectations'' belief government was not going to tax everybody out of existence, failed to deliver. The expected spontaneous upsurge in private activity has never happened in the way the mainstream macroeconomic supply-siders predicted. Further, the chief proponents usually let it out in some way that the chief motivation for their vehement pursuit of budget cuts was to advance their ideological agendas. Of-course, the arguments used to justify the cuts were never presented as political or class-based. The public is easily duped. They have been in the past and they are being conned again now. My role is to keep providing the material and the arguments for the demand-side activists to take into the public debate...

Billy Blog.

Sat 2010-04-17 14:12 EDT

Truthdig - Journalism's Parasites

David Sirota

... New York Times financial reporter Stephen Labaton] just announced he is taking a job with Goldman Sachs--a move that makes you wonder if Labaton watered down his Times coverage in order to get his new gig...Labaton knew Goldman probably wouldn't hire a muckraker who had been aggressively exposing bank transgressions. Then again, maybe Labaton did nothing wrong...

Journalism's Parasites; Truthdig.

Sun 2010-02-28 13:39 EST

America's Future: My Baseline Scenario | Ian Welsh

1) employment is not going to recover to pre-great recession levels for at least a generation, maybe more, in terms of % of people employed. The late Clinton economy is the best you or I will see in our working lives. 2) Politics will continue to be dominated by monied interests and that dominance will increase, rather than decrease. They will use their power to fight over the shrinking pie, rather than to increase it, and will make any real systemic restructuring of the economy essentially impossible. 3) a right wing ``populist'' will get in after Obama. Since the only sort of stimulus they can do is war stimulus, they will pick a war with someone. Who, I'm not sure. In economic terms they will have all the wrong solutions to various real problems... Americans will put off cutting the military, I think, till they've gutted virtually everything else. I expect the military will probably win the fight against financial interests when the moment comes, though we'll see...

America s future; Baseline Scenario; Ian Welsh.

The Realignment Project Tue 2009-09-22 12:31 EDT

Making the Public (Transit) Beautiful

One of the rhetorical strategies of the economic right's cultural politics is to associate the free market with individual pleasure, aesthetic beauty, and technological progress, while associating the public sector with the oppression of the crowd, the spartan ugliness of ``civil service issue,'' and general associations with low-quality, outmoded, cheap machinery...the car, a luxury commodity associated with wealth and prestige, is an extension of your (now much cooler) person, it's fast and futuristic, and it's well-designed and new...By contrast, the dominant media image of mass transit plays up its worst qualities as a social nightmare: it's crowded, claustrophobic, there's no privacy and people and bumping into you, it's noisy and smells terrible, maybe it's dangerous, you're getting delayed again, this is what you take to get where you have to go, not where you want to go. And part of the cultural work of the left in championing the cause of the public must be to counter-act this kind of imagery. Because the public can and should be beautiful.

beauty; makes; public; Realignment Project; transition.

The IRA Analyst Thu 2009-09-17 10:22 EDT

Back to Basis for Securitization and Structured Credit: Interview With Ann Rutledge

To get some further insight into the world of securitization and cash flows, we spoke last week to Ann Rutledge of RR Consulting...The difference between a futures contract for T-bonds and a credit default swap is that the former is a real contract for a real deliverable, whereas the CDS trades against what people think is the cash basis, but there is no cash market price to discipline and validate that derivative market. Rutledge: a contract or structure without a cash basis should not be allowed at all. You cannot have a derivative that is honest and fair to all market participants without a true cash basis. ...derivatives markets such as CDS and CDOs that have no cash basis tend to magnify speculative excesses, while derivative markets where there is a visible cash basis market to discipline investor behavior seem less unstable in terms of systemic risk. Rutledge: If the cash market were visible and could be examined by all participants, then it would give away the ability of the dealer banks to tax participants in the market and extract these abnormal returns. So how do we fix the problem... Rutledge: These originators play this game over and over again and they don't get caught, in part because we do not have a common, standardized set of definitions for governing the most basic aspects of the securitization process. The buyers don't do the work and the accounting framework is a counterparty-oriented framework, not one that is focused on the underlying assets. So banks like Countrywide and WaMu originated and sold some truly hideous structures during the bubble, but the buyers only diligence was reliance upon recourse to these banks. It costs maybe 50bp for a buyer to get the data and grind the numbers to really diligence a securitization based on cash flows, even a complex CDO. But the cost to the buyer and the system of not doing the diligence is an order or magnitude bigger. If the Congress, the SEC and the FASB, and the financial regulators only do one thing this year when it comes to reforming the world of structured credit, then it should be to impose by law and regulation common standards for the definitions used in the marketplace.

Ann Rutledge; basis; interview; IRA Analyst; securitizations; structured credit.

Thu 2008-09-11 00:00 EDT

Clotaire Rapaille, We Salute You // Brainsturbator

``One of the most accomplished, audacious and ambitious con men alive today''; ``maybe, Rapailles real target for his lexicon of persuasive techniques isnt the audience, the masses that hes allegedly manipulating. Maybe his real target is CEOs themselves''

Brainsturbator; Clotaire Rapaille; salute.

Sat 2008-07-12 00:00 EDT

Accrued Interest: Maybe it's another drill

..."his is the first time in my career that I truly believe U.S. Treasury bonds sold off on credit concern."

Accrued Interest; drilling; Maybe.

Wed 2008-07-09 00:00 EDT

naked capitalism: Wolfgang Munchau: Maybe the Economists Are to Blame After All

"policies to avoid recessions do more damage in the long run than letting slumps run their course."

blames; Economist; Maybe; naked capitalism; Wolfgang Munchau.

Thu 2007-12-13 00:00 EST

naked capitalism: Maybe the Real Reason for the Central Bank (Especially the Fed's) Actions Wednesday

Fed auction plan; coordinated central bank actions

action Wednesday; central bank; especially; Fed S; Maybe; naked capitalism; real reason.

Thu 2007-11-01 00:00 EDT

naked capitalism: Maybe the Real Reason for the SIV Rescue Plan?

MLEC to rescue Citigroup

Maybe; naked capitalism; real reason; SIV Rescue Plan.