Op-Ed Contributors: The End of the Financial World as We Know It (flag)

www.nytimes.com — We have a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what? >

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The End of the Financial World As We Know It (and I feel fine)
The Big Picture — ... of the SEC’s votes — they were frequently about the clients he had represented as a defense attorney. By July of 2002, Senator (and future GOP presidential candidate) John McCain was calling for Pitt’s resignation.” Pitt, not surprisingly, demoralized the agency. To investor advocacy groups, having Pitt as SEC chief was like putting Osama bin Laden in charge of Homeland Security. > Source: The End of the Financial World As We Know It MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID ...

Sunday morning links
The Mess That Greenspan Made — TOP STORIES The End of the Financial World as We Know It - NY Times Evans says Fed needs to mimic below-zero rates - Reuters Ukraine: Serious natural gas shortages possible - AP Asia needs to fully wake up to the scale of the West's economic crisis - Telegraph The culture of scarcity - LA Times SEC Said to Examine More Ponzi Schemes After Madoff - Bloomberg Credit Bubble Bulletin - Year End Facts - Noland, Prudent Bear U.S. Debt Expected To Soar This Year - Washington Post U.S. governors seek ...

Fixing the Financial System
gary-weiss.com — Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have an essay in the New York Times today, "The End of the Financial World as We Know It," which is one of the very best I've found on the current financial mess and how not to repeat it. Actually we already know one way out of the mess, which is already happening because of the change in administrations: get rid of the appalling head of the SEC, Christopher Cox. In recent days, Cox has actually admitted that one of the centerpieces of his agency's reaction to the financial crisis, its assault on short-sellers, was a crummy idea. His excuse was, ...

How to Repair a Broken Financial World
The Big Picture — ... If you want banks to re-lend the money, you need to provide them not with preferred stock, which is essentially a loan, but with tangible common equity — so that they might write off their losses, resolve their troubled assets and then begin to make new loans, something they won’t be able to do until they’re confident in their own balance sheets. But as it happened, the banks took the taxpayer money and just sat on it. > Source: The End of the Financial World As We Know It MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID ...

Superb Article
Slope of Hope with Tim Knight — I heartily endorse this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html

Madoff Fraud: Harry Markopolos
Short-Term Trading — May be I missed this in Mr Madoff's thread here in the spec List.Mr Markopolos began pushing the SEC to investigate Madoff already quite some time ago. The End of the Financial World as We Know It - NYT LINK The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud - 7 Nov 2005 LINK He wrote in his report to the SEC in 2005: "I have outlined a detailed set of Red Flags that make very suspicious that Bernie Madoff's returns aren't real and, if they are real, then they would almost certainly have to be generated by front-running customer order flow ...

Lewis and Einhorn in the NYT
CrossingWallStreet.com — The must-read article from yesterday is Michael Lewis and David Einhorn’s two-parter (here and here) in the New York Times. For the most part, I think they describe the problems fairly well. My issue is that I’m not entirely satisfied when a highly complex issue is reduced to the long-term good being sacrificed for short-term gain. Whenever I hear problems put in a neat package like that, I’m suspicious. It’s like hearing that a problem is due to “a lack of communication.” Call me skeptical. The more I look at the credit mess, the more bewildering I find it. ...

Some Thoughts on 2009
Information Arbitrage — ... Michael Lewis and David Einhorn penned an insightful Op-Ed in yesterday's New York Times. In effect, they raise several reasons for why the financial crisis happened and what can be done to address the problems. Interestingly, many of their root causes (mis-aligned, ...