Sunday, September 28, 2008

Don't worry, be happy

Yet another shot of ouzo for JJ.
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4 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Bring back Rudy!

9/28/2008 3:26 PM
Tecumseh said...

More: the administration suffered an apparent nervous breakdown. Having survived the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrorist attacks in September 2001, it took a financial crisis to bring true chaos to the heart of the free world. Is this the way the modern economy ends? In a scene of Beckettian farce?

9/28/2008 3:31 PM
Tecumseh said...

And, if by chance we do get some of those $700 billion back, look where they will go: a pair of government slush funds created in July as part of the Economic Recovery Act that pump tax dollars into the coffers of low-income housing advocacy groups, such as Acorn. Just damn.

9/28/2008 3:39 PM
Tecumseh said...

Yet another take: JPMorgan was the first bank to make a big bet on credit default swaps. It built up a "swaps" desk in the mid-'90s and hired young math and science grads from schools like MIT and Cambridge to create a market for the complex instruments. Within a few years, the credit default swap (CDS) became the hot financial instrument, the safest way to parse out risk while maintaining a steady return. "I've known people who worked on the Manhattan Project," says Mark Brickell, who at the time was a 40-year-old managing director at JPMorgan. "And for those of us on that trip, there was the same kind of feeling of being present at the creation of something incredibly important."

Asshole.

So much of what's gone wrong with the financial system in the past year can be traced back to credit default swaps, which ballooned into a $62 trillion market before ratcheting down to $55 trillion last week—nearly four times the value of all stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. There's a reason Warren Buffett called these instruments "financial weapons of mass destruction."

Cosmic idiocy.

9/28/2008 4:17 PM

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