Ha, great summary of the financial crisis.....and as a porn fan especially liked the synopsis in porn terms :). I also happen to unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it) work in the financial industry. I have to say there was actually a very small group of like MIT geeks who actually understood what derivatives were or how all these bundled CDOs were actually structured. The vast majority of us are pretty much just idiots doing a job. But the banks hired these guys to devise these products and how to make money off of those products, basically the banks made horrible investments and then gambled on them....and obviously didnt work out for them in most cases, hence why they turned to the Govt with their hands out in 2008.
The bailouts were without a doubt a huge transfer of taxpayer money to a bunch of private and horribly run asshole banks....but one thing that nobody focuses on, and which the government has done a horrible job of highlighting because the bailouts themselves are politically toxic, but the government actually made money in the end off those bailouts because of the interest they charged the banks and from the sale of shares in some banks the government received in exchange for the cash (i.e. Citibank), but nobody really knows that, which is part of what helped fuel the whole Tea Party movement and their fears about big government tossing away taxpayer money. Anyway, to me though the biggest crime in all of this is that the same bankers and wall streeters who 3 years ago demanded they be bailed out by the government have then turned around and spend god knows how much money and effort fighting the government from regulating in any way the kind of bullshit investing and practices that got us in this mess in the first place
Ha, great summary of the financial crisis.....and as a porn fan especially liked the synopsis in porn terms :). I also happen to unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it) work in the financial industry. I have to say there was actually a very small group of like MIT geeks who actually understood what derivatives were or how all these bundled CDOs were actually structured. The vast majority of us are pretty much just idiots doing a job. But the banks hired these guys to devise these products and how to make money off of those products, basically the banks made horrible investments and then gambled on them....and obviously didnt work out for them in most cases, hence why they turned to the Govt with their hands out in 2008.
ReplyDeleteThe bailouts were without a doubt a huge transfer of taxpayer money to a bunch of private and horribly run asshole banks....but one thing that nobody focuses on, and which the government has done a horrible job of highlighting because the bailouts themselves are politically toxic, but the government actually made money in the end off those bailouts because of the interest they charged the banks and from the sale of shares in some banks the government received in exchange for the cash (i.e. Citibank), but nobody really knows that, which is part of what helped fuel the whole Tea Party movement and their fears about big government tossing away taxpayer money. Anyway, to me though the biggest crime in all of this is that the same bankers and wall streeters who 3 years ago demanded they be bailed out by the government have then turned around and spend god knows how much money and effort fighting the government from regulating in any way the kind of bullshit investing and practices that got us in this mess in the first place