Further Reading
FT Alphaville — ... for second acts on Wall Street.” - The End of Wall Street – or, what went wrong . - You can fight climate change and fight the recession, ...

Links 11/11/08
naked capitalism — ... fixation. Unemployment by industry: Brace for Impact Eric Jansen (hat tip reader CrocodileChuck). The tone of the opening section and the less than slick graphics might be off-putting, but this has a lot of good data and makes a persuasive case (that the trajectory for employment in the US is worse than most anticipate). Shoot the Messenger Independent Accountant The Bretton Woods sequel will flop Gideon Rachman, Financial Times The End Michael Lewis, Portfolio The G-20 communique of November 15th Dani Rodrik. ...

Tuesday morning links
The Mess That Greenspan Made — TOP STORIES Citigroup to help at-risk borrowers stay in homes - AP Obama Asks Bush to Provide Help for Automakers - NY Times G20 summit may be fittingly inept end to Bush administration - Telegraph Now are we in a recession? - Jeff Frankel's Blog Lehman Bros.' financial crisis burns Asian bond investors - USA Today The End - Portfolio.com GM Plunges as Deutsche Says It May Become Worthless - Bloomberg Why Washington Cannot Prevent Depression - Money and Markets ...

Michael Lewis: The End
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed — Loooong Michael Lewis piece in Portfolio on “the end” of the old Wall Street, and how it all came down. Like me, Lewis left the financial game years ago thinking it was absurd and about to end. I was a decade too early, and Lewis left almost two decades early. Who knew the madness could go on so long? Good piece. Read it. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual. ...

Oh No! Not The Bull!
MadeMan.com — ... ALL OF WALL STREET WAS FALLING APART. They got a lot of heat for appearing to be completely clueless about the very industry they were meant to cover. But when I look at this awesome rendering of the Wall Street bull down for the count created by Ji Lee, I am impressed. Is all forgiven? Well at least his balls aren't spraypainted blue, but I suppose we'll have to read the text of the main story to find out if Portfolio is worth its salt. Portfolio: The End, November 11, 2008

Write-Offs: 11.11.08
Dealbreaker — $$$ The End [Portfolio] $$$ Blackrock Says Those Bear Stearns Assets Are Doing Great [Clusterstock] $$$ Merrill Chief Sees Shades of 1929 [Dealbook]

Michael Lewis explains CDS!
Rolfe Winkler — The author of Liar’s Poker has an unparalleled ability to inform and entertain while writing about high finance.  His latest article on Portfolio.com is so good, I wanted to devote a post to telling everyone to go read it. Besides being hilarious, Lewis offers particularly clever insight on the role CDS played in blowing up the mortgage market.  And how those shorting the market actually perpetuated its growth. He follows analyst-turned-investor Steve Eisman, who long knew the structured finance machine on Wall Street was pumping out piles of dogshit securities to sell to investors.  What Eisman could never figure out is why Wall Street would put ...

The End of Wall Street / Investment Banking Bonus Matrix
EconomPic — Michael Lewis has a great article titled 'The End' in Portfolio which inspired the investment banking bonus matrix below. I wrote back in September about the Downfall of the Investment Banking Model and he goes 1000 steps further, with details that are only possible from starting out in Wall Street's epicenter in the early 1980's. While I highlight some sections of the article, I highly recommend you go and read the whole thing. He doesn't take long to dive in: To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no ...

Midweek financial gum drops
Mises Economics Blog — Have twenty minutes of free-time? Then be sure to read The End of Wall Streets Boom by Michael Lewis (same guy behind Money Ball and Liar's Poker). Well-written, engaging and informational. And speaking of the end of booms, Randall Forsyth at Barron's recently published "Uncle Sam's Credit Line Running Out?" You may also be interested in a recent Bloomberg interview with Marc Faber: And here is interesting CNBC interview with Martin Hennecke:

links for 2008-11-12
Economist's View — Human frailty caused this crisis - FT The Real Difference Between Bankruptcy and Bailout - Robert Reich More on Elections and Fundamentals - Consider the Evidence The End of Wall Street's Boom - Portfolio.com Stopping a Global Meltdown - C. Fred Bergsten - washingtonpost.com Government Purchases: 1932 to 1941 - pgl Why Not Let GM Go Bankrupt? - The Baseline Scenario

Okay (you may well ask): what's the right message?
EconoPundit — What will most readers take away from Michael Lewis' schadenfreude-laden critical essay on Wall Street entitled (wonder why?) "The End"? My answer is: probably the wrong message. When billions of dollars are wasted by young highly educated financial experts who don't actually know how to allocate capital you should be applauding just how much real value the genuine (nonfinancial) economy generated in the first place. That young financial wizards built leveraged pyramids on this base of genuine wealth is neither new nor surprising. Capitalism continually opens opportunities to rent seekers. And -- sooner or later -- the market corrects inefficiencies created by exploiters ...

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com
FinanceProfessor.com — WOW!! Have some time? You may just want to drop whatever your plans were for this. It is that good. By Michael Lewis (he of Liar's Poker and Money Ball fame). The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com: "The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong" one and only one look-in: "We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default ...

Wednesday links: they are the system
Abnormal Returns — The big multi-strategy hedge funds “can’t bet against the system like the old ones did; they are the system.”(Ultimi Barbarorum also Market Movers) American Express (AXP) holders hope being a bank holding company does not imply a bank-like valuation.  (WSJ.com also ...

Wahoo Wha??
World Beta - Engineering Targeted Returns and Risk — A lot of the endowments are struggling with the recent market meltdown. Unfortunately, my alma mater happens to be one of the worst performers. As an aside, I have always wondered why investors in private equity don't hedge their portfolios against long bear markets? The biggest risk factors to a PE portfolio are a bad economy coupled with a long stock market decline - the exits disappear, there is no liquidity, funding is scarce, multiples contract, and the underlying businesses face tougher conditions. Why in the world wouldn't you hedge that, or even run the allocation with a constant % hedge? Using something as ...

for posterity
Decline and Fall of Western Civilization — one of the silver linings of the financial crisis has been some excellent journalism. to wit: michael lewis pens what may be the most engaging synopsis which will be produced chronicling how america came to the brink of depression. niall ferguson in vanity fair gives him a run for the money, though, correctly assaying that the meaning and desirability of fiat currency will be called into question before this return from madness is over.

Portfolio Cover: After the Fall
The Big Picture —

Turnabout is fair play — an impressive turn in the capital markets
The Big Picture — Good Evening: As a witness in recent days to unambiguously bad economic news, increasingly poor earnings guidance from U.S. corporations, and heightened selling pressure in the U.S. stock market, I had a foreboding sense that today’s session would be both important and impactful. Jobless claims pierced above the 500,000 mark, Intel, Applied Materials, and a couple of retailers joined the growing list of companies reporting disappointments, and the S&P 500 futures this morning were pointing to an imminent break below the October 10 lows. Like many market participants, I girded myself for what promised to be a very rough ride in the equity markets. And then we opened flat and ...

The End, Like a Commencement Perhaps
Capital Gains and Games — This is your Sunday required reading, two days early (or three days late).  Michael Lewis gets to the bottom of it all.  Here is one of many passages I particularly appreciated: From that moment, though, the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith. No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered ...

For Your Weekend Reading Pleasure …
The Baseline Scenario — There isn’t much new information for those who have been following the crisis, but Michael Lewis is one of the best writers around.       

"Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud."
Conglomerate — That's Michael Lewis, reflecting on his Liar's Poker days. Now he is writing about the end of Wall Street as we have known it. Read the fascinating story of Steve Eisman and Lewis' awkward interview of John Gutfreund. Thanks to Don Clarke for the tip. ...

Two Michael Lewis pieces
Newmark's Door — ... Many, many people on the Web have cited and discussed this Michael Lewis piece, "The End", on our current financial problems, but in case you haven't seen it, I recommend it. As noted here earlier, a key element in making the problem so big and hard to contain seems to have been the terrible performance of the ratings agencies: ...

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 doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the ...

links for November 18th
uglychart.com: a blog about stocks — The End of Wall Street’s Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com - stocks

Who Is Steve Eisman?
TIM - Timothy Sykes — Who Is Steve Eisman? Posted by Timothy Sykes on Thu 20th of Nov, 2008 07:58:08 AM A few people sent me THIS truly great article about the end of Wall Street written by truly great author Michael Lewis. A lot of it–the majority of its 9 pages–focuses on a relative unknown named Steve Eisman, who was Meredith Whitney’s mentor. Reading some quotes by and about the guy, I knew I liked his style: “I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit,” “He’s sort of a prick in a way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.” “I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn’t give a shit what it ...

The End Of Wall Street
Midas Oracle .ORG — ---------- Midas Oracle .ORG = Site Map + Archives + Best + Charts + Exchanges + Software + Links + People + Write A Post Or A Page + How To Publish Similar blog posts: Since 2002, when research was formally separated from investment banking, the quality of research on Wall Street has deteriorated, and many top analysts have left the business. Barry Ritholtz has a new home. US bank failure predictions Historical Prediction Markets Here is a Wall Street pundit who is very quick to blame the ...

Features of the week
Finance Trends Matter — Commodities, the latest jobs report, a "bubble" in US Treasuries, and more food for thought; all in our latest, "Features of the week". 1. Stocks drop after weak jobs report (NY Times). "...stocks fell sharply on news that the American economy had shed 533,000 jobs in November, its worst monthly losses in 34 years. The unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent from 6.5 percent, and economists said the number of Americans without work would continue to swell as the recession spreads like an oil spill." 2. iTraxx Crossover index points to high risk of corporate ...

The end, the end, and the end
FT Alphaville — So finally, Alan “Ace” Greenberg has called “the end” of Wall Street as we knew it. The octagenarian former Bear Stearns chief executive who is approaching his 61st year on Wall Street has told Bloomberg that the investment-banking model he helped pioneer is “gone”.“There’s no more Wall Street,” Greenberg told Bloomberg’s “Money & Politics” television programme. “That model just doesn’t work because it’s at the mercy of rumours.” And rumours “can start and turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy,” Greenberg said, adding that he has “never seen anything close” to the current economic decline and turmoil in the financial markets — and that’s really saying something for an 81-year-old. It sounds ...

"I Told You So" and Other Just-So Stories
Conglomerate — Further to co-blogger David Zaring's excellent post, I'm getting a little weary of financial crisis stories inthe popular press of the "so-and-so-saw-it-coming-and-why-didn't-the-rest-of-you(us)" variety, like this one.  Here's another Michael Lewis article (another long one) that heralds the end of Wall Street as we know it, and profiles hedge fund manager Steve ...

The End
GalaTime — Michael Lewis @ CN Portfolio

A dash of this integer and a dab of that regression
Mises Economics Blog — Wondering about the various mathematical formulas that were used by various Wall Street firms in quantifying risk? Here are several pieces that discuss the role quants played in modeling risk and uncertainty: - My Manhattan Project by Michael Osinksi (NY Mag) - Recipe for Disaster by Felix Simon (Wired) - How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers by Saul Hansell (NY Times) In addition you may enjoy two relatively recent pieces by Michael Lewis, The End of Wall Street's Boom and Wall Street on the Tundra

USA: Banana Republic
HCPG Blog — One of the best articles we've read in a long time, written by Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the IMF (2007-2008). Take a minute or two and read the article in its entirety. We've highlighted the parts that held the most interest to us: ...

The Man Who Crashed the World?
The Baseline Scenario — ... Back in November, Michael Lewis wrote a great story in Portfolio on the financial crisis, focusing on the traders who saw that the housing bubble was going to crash, bringing mortgage-backed securities down with it – and made lots of money betting on it. Now Lewis is back with his ...

Goldman Sachs, the Scapegoat of Champions
Minyanville — 'Tis the season to pile on to Goldman Sachs ( GS ), in case you missed the memo. The hatchet jobs that appeared in Rolling Stone and New York magazines have apparently caught the attention of the men and women of Capitol Hill. Not surprisingly, they want a piece of the action. In fact, it appears they're positively desperate to debunk any conspiracy theory about Goldman's influence over government -- even if it means displaying their ignorance of how Wall Street works for all the world to see. Today's Wall Street Journal brings us the story of a Senate probe into fraud at some of Wall Street's biggest mortgage-bond-market players, including Goldman and Deutsche ...