When the SEC filed its civil suit against Goldman, the firm and its stalwarts argued that the firm would come through with its reputation intact. Anyone who watched Goldman over the last decade had reason to doubt that cheery view. The firm has undergone a remarkable change, from one that was notoriously aggressive but had […]
Read more...The drama of financial regulatory reform is, to a considerable degree, playing right into the industry’s hands. I have several pet theories as to why this has happened. One is the fact that the drafting of new rules and the related horse-trading started before there had been any meaningful investigations, and more important, there did […]
Read more...By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT consultant Tracking the changes to the US financial reform package in minute detail would drive you nuts. But there is a quick and dirty alternative: simply compare the Geithner/Summers trailer from July ’09 with the latest one (Geithner, solo, last week, Thursday 6th May, 2010). They each […]
Read more...The line of thinking that underlies an investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is a challenge to conventional wisdom about the financial crisis. The prevailing view is that since credit ratings were one of the single biggest points of failure in the crisis, the ratings agencies were one of the biggest, if not […]
Read more...The collateralized debt obligation probe widens. From the Wall Street Journal: The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG—have also received civil subpoenas from the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a sweeping investigation of banks’ selling and trading of mortgage-related deals, the person […]
Read more...Frank Partnoy, derivatives salesman turned law professor, took an ill fated star turn in the Financial Times today. In a comment titled, “Goldman is wrong target for official censure,” he writes (among other things): “Goldman is not to blame for the financial crisis,” a straw man if I ever saw one. I hate to say […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports that Morgan Stanley is under investigation for allegedly creating CDOs it used to wager against clients: Among the deals that have been scrutinized are two named after U.S. Presidents James Buchanan and Andrew Jackson, a person familiar with the matter says. Morgan Stanley helped design the deals and bet against […]
Read more...By Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets IT specialist Here’s someone with his head screwed on, back in April 2007, who proves singlehandedly that “hoocoodanode” was no defense for failing to anticipate the implosion of the shadow banking system (more on this prescient analyst in due course): For several years now, we have marvelled at […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The recent financial crisis has shown that the legal and regulatory steps that have been taken to provide information […]
Read more...But opacity, leverage, and moral hazard are not accidental byproducts of otherwise salutary innovations; they are the direct intent of the innovations. No one at the major capital markets firms was celebrated for creating markets to connect borrowers and savers transparently and with low risk. After all, efficient markets produce minimal profits. They were instead […]
Read more...In the various blogosphere efforts to dissect the Goldman Abacus transaction now in the SEC’s crosshairs, some commentators have characterized it as unusual, a “bespoke” CDO“, or “a very complicated deal…a supersynthetic CDO.” Effectively, the view is that Abacus is a multi-tranche variant on the single tranche CDO structure that was developed with corporate CDS, […]
Read more...This is a post which I originally published at Credit Writedowns earlier today. I have written a number of posts which point to a shift in the center of power on Wall Street from the client-facing advisory business to the market-making trading business. I think understanding this shift is vital to understanding what caused the […]
Read more...An article at the Independent, “Goldman packs a punch: Sherwood and Van Praag take their corners“: Wonder when we’ll see the first display ad along these lines….
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