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

David Fiderer

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.

Wed 2010-06-09 18:45 EDT

London business figures embroiled in Kaupthing fraud investigation: Serious Fraud Office team thought to be to be scrutinising Deutsche Bank's role in alleged suspect trades| Business | The Guardian

Simon Bowers| The Guardian

A Serious Fraud Office investigation into Kaupthing, the failed Icelandic bank, is understood to be pursuing a number of allegations of market manipulation involving investment vehicles controlled by some of the bank's largest clients, including several high profile UK business leaders. It is alleged that in the weeks and months before Iceland's financial system went into meltdown, certain trades improperly used at least €500m (£413m) of Kaupthing funds in an effort to manipulate credit derivatives. Bank bosses hoped this would restore crumbling confidence in Kaupthing's solvency in the months before the bank collapsed in October 2008...The effect was for investment vehicles -- financed by Kaupthing loans, and at least nominally controlled by some of the bank's largest clients -- to take on risk associated with the bank going bust. Kaupthing loans were being use to write insurance against Kaupthing bonds defaulting...Iceland's Truth Commission obtained details of emails sent by Deutsche Bank staff to Kaupthing which, according to its report, demonstrated that the German bank had been offering advice on how to influence the CDS price on Kaupthing bonds from early 2008...

alleged suspect trades; business; Guardian; Kaupthing fraud investigation; London business figures embroiled; scrutinising Deutsche Bank's role; Serious Fraud Office team thought.

naked capitalism Tue 2010-02-16 16:38 EST

AIG Scandal: Fed as Chump or Fed as Crony?

No matter which way you look at it, the picture that is emerging of the Federal Reserve, as revealed by the ongoing probes into its AIG bailout, is singularly unflattering. The explanations for its actions can only support one of two interpretations: that the Fed was a chump, taken by the financiers, or a crony, and was fully aware that it was not just rescuing AIG, but doing so in an overly generous way so as to assist financial firms in a way it hoped would not be widely noticed or understood...

AIG Scandal; chump; crony; Fed; naked capitalism.

Thu 2008-07-03 00:00 EDT

Faustian economics:

Hell hath no limits--By Wendell Berry (Harper's Magazine); "Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism"; "our 'identity' is located not in the impulse of selfhood but in deliberately maintained connections"; "in the phrase 'free market,' the word 'free' has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others"; "we confuse limits with confinement...our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to _fullness_ of relationship and meaning"; "we want to make our economic landscapes sustainably and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only by raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and, ultimately, the art of living."

Faustian economics.