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BUSINESS: Liar's Poker Folds
Baseball Crank —
I've been waiting for Michael Lewis to write the definitive account of the credit crisis. This is an excellent start.
Here's a few of his vignettes on the housing market madness at the foundation of the crisis, although he has much more on how it worked its way through the financial system:
A must-read
Maggie's Farm —
... Michael Lewis of Liar's Poker fame returns to Wall Street to survey the mess. (Thanks, reader.) One quote from the darkly humorous piece: ...
Explaining The Crash
Seeing the Forest —
... I think this is one of the better explanations of the Wall Street crash: The End of Wall Street's Boom . Go read. ----> Scroll down to see comments. Posted by Dave Johnson at November 12, 2008 12:39 PM ...
Viking Pundit — The engine of doom - Michael Lewis of "Liar's Poker" has a must-read article (long, some salty language) on the subprime mortgage mess. If you want to know why Wall Street imploded, here's a good place to start: " In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000. " posted by Eric at ...
Short seller quote of the decade
TigerHawk —
via Michael Lewis : “We have a simple thesis,” Eisman explained. “There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there.” When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman’s logic—the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was ...
Wall Street's Doomsday Machine
small dead animals —
Wall Street's Doomsday Machine Grab a coffee. Or a strong drink. This is your "must read" for 2008. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA. But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning ...
Boom goes the Bull
Angry Bear —
rdan Reader Bear points us to a great essay by Michael Lewis in Condi Naste Portfolio.com: In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they ...
Moral Hazard
Matthew Yglesias —
... association. They said that though their investments were down somewhat as a result of the crisis, they had avoided any kind of catastrophe. And the reason they avoided catastrophe, they said, was that Swiss private banks are unlimited liability partnerships. And that, they said, makes them risk averse. This is somewhat similar to the conclusion Michael Lewis reaches at the end of his entertaining and informative Portfolio article on the situation in which he suggests that the transformation of Wall Street firms from partnerships to public companies played a ...
Wall Street Wall of Denial Starts Crumbling
Washblog - Diaries —
If you haven't already, please read this piece by Michael Lewis. It's the best I've read and it gives a very personal depth to the Credit Crisis. ...
Wall Street's Doomsday Machine
Pacific Views —
... Michael Lewis' The End of Wall Street's Boom traces the root of the crisis to the go-go 80's when two substantial changes occurred: 1) hedge funds managing derivatives and 2) making investment banks publicly traded companies. He noted that when he left Wall Street and ...
(Tranche Town Rock) You reap what you sow
Corrente —
... . Just go read; it's all about how infestment banking really worked, by the author of Liars Poker. It's long, but it's real reporting that will help you frame what you read in Bloomberg every day. These paragraphs caught my eye: ...
Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Daily Kos —
Wednesday is a good day to abbreviate. Thomas Friedman: Honest John's Banking Scam (aka Citibank) is not a shining example of business ethics. In fact, read this. Michael Lewis: What Tom Friedman wanted you to read, and with good reason. Mark Stein: And while you're on the topic, here's more about the exec compensation your tax dollars are paying for. And if you're not angry yet, you're not clicking the links. Thomas Frank: Get rid of the contractor and bring back the honest federal worker. EJ ...
Michael Lewis on the Financial Meltdown
Galley Slaves —
... But ultimately, this seems a small quibble. Lewis is the real deal. And here he is revisiting Wall Street at the end times. It's pretty great.
Word of the Year: Bailout
The Moderate Voice —
... that returns to five of the most recent market meltdowns and analyzes what reporters thought was happening before, during and after each of them. And in a Portfolio piece titled The End, Lewis returns to his old Liar’s Poker haunts to figure out what went wrong. ...
"We have a simple thesis. There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there."
Hit & Run —
Been meaning to link to this one for a while: Michael Lewis, author of the entertaining Wall Street memoir Liar's Poker, finds a good vantage point from which to view the crash -- through the eyes of the investors who were smart enough to short virtually everything.
...
Great Power, Great Responsibility
Ross Douthat —
... , but I think it's worth mentioning here because when you read about how the American leadership class acquitted itself at Citibank, or on Wall Street in general, I think you can see the dark side of meritocracy at work - the same dark side that shadows an instititution like Harvard, where a job in investment banking became, for a time, the summum bonum of meritocratic life. The mistakes that our elites made, and that led us to this pass, have their roots in flaws common to all elites, in all times and places - hubris, arrogance, insulation from the costs of their ...
Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Daily Kos —
... has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Michael Abramowitz: Bolten and Hadley struggled with Bush's popularity and failed at explaining their boss to the American people. They should have just googled Sisyphus. Eugene Robinson: Cuba policy needs to be torn up and rewritten. Maybe not first on the list (Fidel will pass, and then...) David Brooks: Four long form writers worth honoring for their work: Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker), Christopher Caldwell (both on Wall Street's ...
"Somehow"
Rising Hegemon —
... to protect investors from financial predators, the [Securities and Exchange] Commission was re-engineered by the Bush administration into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with political clout from investors. Anyway, other than that very small quibble, The End of the Financial World as We Know It (and its companion piece How to Repair a Broken Financial World) are very worthwhile (as is Lewis's December "Portfolio" piece The End of Wall Street's Boom).
Will Banks Become Utilities?
TPM Election Central —
... and others plunged on Monday and seem to be recovering today.) Let's step back further, beyond the immediate problems of how to bail out or repair the banks. What are banks likely to look like in a few years? After all, Wall Street, as we once knew it, is now gone with all the investment houses having either disappeared or turned themselves into bank holding companies. The idea of nationalization has been out there but that, I think, is a loaded word and not quite right. We've already lost our virginity by partially nationalizing the banks when we put taxpayers money into them ...
Hugh Hewitt: Amaze.fm Song of the Week: "Deep Calling" by Mark Thomas
Townhall.com Blog's TownHall Blog —
... and see what the people think. The most popular song of the week gets played on the radio show. Off to the Hannity show, then back to CA. Be sure to read the Michael Lewis article on Wall Street's meltdown . (HT: ...
Hugh Hewitt: Amaze.fm Song of the Week: "Deep Calling" by Mark Thomas
Hugh Hewitt's TownHall Blog —
... and see what the people think. The most popular song of the week gets played on the radio show. Off to the Hannity show, then back to CA. Be sure to read the Michael Lewis article on Wall Street's meltdown . (HT: ...
Credit Default Swaps and All That:
The Volokh Conspiracy —
In Michael Lewis's fascinating essay on "The End" of Wall Street , he mocks the alchemy of how Wall Street could take a bunch of junk mortgages and convert them into AAA rated paper and sell it over and over. But while he mocks, he doesn't really explain what was going on. I just came across a ...
Lewis on Schroeder on Buffett
Pundit Review —
... , “If Buffet is pissed about the book, I’m not surprised.” Lewis, whose writing on all things financial is always tremendous , continues, Alice Schroeder is a former Morgan Stanley research analyst, able to understand and to explain Buffett’s money-making, but she declined to confine herself to the business at hand. She has sought to describe Buffett’s psychological landscape as clearly as his financial one. For the reader, the results are pretty terrific–there are not a lot of 838-page narratives that leave you wanting more–but for Buffett they are no doubt upsetting. Over ...
Michael Lewis Attacks Goldman Sachs, Wall St.'s Political Influence (VIDEO)
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed —
... When asked why his article "The End Of Wall Street," which appeared in Portfolio in December of last year, didn't have more influence in the government, Lewis said he had learned through friends that it had been widely read in Washington. ...
Goldman Sachs: Rogue Company
Pacific Views —
... And was Goldman Sachs the innocent bystander it claims? Well, recall the fascinating piece by Michael Lewis last year and the role Goldman Sachs played in that? ...
Viking Pundit — An epic tale of pride and ruin – Business writer Michael Lewis has a great piece in Vanity Fair on Joe Cassano who headed up AIG's Financial Products unit and started the dominoes tumbling in " The man who crashed the world ." For extra background on the financial meltdown, be sure to also read Lewis' " The End ." posted by Eric at 10:43 PM
The End Of Wall Street: The Wall Street Journal's VIDEO
The Huffington Post | Full News Feed —
... The End Of Wall Street. Whether you believe the sentiment behind the name of the Wall Street Journal's new web series, they make a compelling case. (By the way, check out Michael Lewis' seminal piece in Portfolio of the same name). Focusing on the period of "easy money," roughly between the 2002 and 2006, where the Fed kept interest rates at historic lows, part one of the WSJ's series examines what caused the housing crisis and resultant recession in the United States. The series features interviews with several of the journal's top reporters. ...
