Tom Adams in the media

Augmenting Ed’s recent links re Tom Adams, regular readers will remember Yves got a magazine cover and write-up in Calcalist.

Now Tom Adams, another contributor to “Naked Capitalism”, (and ECONned helper, Magnetar sleuth, etc etc), has got a writeup by Calcalist. The main article is here, and it’s all in Hebrew, which Google Translate struggles with, though you can make out roughly what’s going on.

There’s a sidebar article too, though, which is short enough to clean up, thus (and with apologies to genuine Hebrew speakers for any unintended liberties with the translation!):

Tom Adams and Yves Smith Change Wall Street

by Uri Psuvsky, Calcalist

A few months after his dismissal, in an attempt to understand what really happened to him and his company, Tom Adams opened an independent investigation. This led him to meet Yves Smith, (Susan Webber), who runs the world’s leading financial blog, Naked Capitalism (an extensive interview with Smith was published two months ago).

“When I met Yves, in early 2009, the level of denial and fear in the market were high, and very few financial or media people wanted to find out what really happened”, says Adams. “I had bad feelings about the role I played by the collapse, I thought I was damaged goods and I was not sure about my future employment prospects. But when I was working with Yves, publishing my findings at “Naked Capitalism”, I began to realize the value of 20 years of experience in providing an insider’s introduction to the crisis. Then I started to receive consultancy requests from organizations who needed counseling, and I realized that I could contribute to changes in the industry. ”

The collaboration between Adams and Smith did indeed led to changes in the industry. Among other things, they broke the conspiracy of Magnetar, the Chicago hedge fund, now under investigation by the Israel Securities Authority, that inflated the real estate bubble in order to bet on its collapse. Another success story: how they managed to bend the central bank’s hand and to publish full details on AIG’s rescue , which the Fed was trying to keep classified for ten years. Adams was able to recover all the information and publish it at Smith’s blog, leading to the leaking of the original documents by a member of Congress, and opening the current demons’ dance against Goldman Sachs.