worth reading: The End of the Financial World as We Know It
Thanks to my on-line friend Al Billings for pointing this out to me:
By MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID EINHORN
Published: January 3, 2009
AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. The world seems to be saying: "Good God, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?"
Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves...
Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible...
Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 - more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed - but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999...
OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense...
The rest can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html?ref=opinion
How to Repair a Broken Financial World
- Continued from "The End of the Financial World As We Know It"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhornb.html?pagewanted=all
By MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID EINHORN
Published: January 3, 2009
AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. The world seems to be saying: "Good God, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?"
Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves...
Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible...
Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 - more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed - but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999...
OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense...
The rest can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html?ref=opinion
How to Repair a Broken Financial World
- Continued from "The End of the Financial World As We Know It"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhornb.html?pagewanted=all