Archive for January, 2008

The Subprime Crisis, Part 3: The Empire Strikes Back.

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

The reaction against futures, once their existence was validated by the Treasury-Federal Reserve Study (see Subprime Crisis, Part 2) in the early 1980's, took a more tactical form. The question became what tribe would dominate the offering of these contracts, and how would their use by the bottle-babies of the ...

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Part 2: The Birth of Derivatives.

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

The single best piece of luck I ever had was to write a couple articles about what was then a gleam in the eye of a couple dozen people in the world, Standard and Poors futures and CPI (Inflation) futures. I learned more about risk and about the human condition in ...

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A Personal Journey. Part 1

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

As I watch the sorry sight of the collapse of the mythical global regulatory structure known as the Basle Accords I & II, my mind constantly wanders back to an ironic episode in my personal struggle for banks’ “right” to act like private profit-makers in a regulation-bound environment. Never ...

The Four Pillars and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Where Did Bank of America’s Offer for Countrywide Leave Us?

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

A week ago I was shocked, horrified and so on, about the Four Pillars decision to drop a billion dollar coin in that subprime mortgage pokie machine, Countrywide Financial. It sounded a discordant note in the general dirge of helplessness being played by the banks as the mortgage borrowers of ...