[Freddd]

I read til it said 8 or 10 years ago.....IT’S BUSH’S FAULT!

Of course he was the one who called on congress multiple times to reign in fannie and freddie/ACORN etc...

[GeronL]

what a pathetic article. please tell me this didn’t actually get put on paper?

[SeekAndFind]

The man observes the following pattern that occurred and is still occurring in Wall Street :

* Most of the guys from the lower third of the class who went to Wall Street had a lot of nice qualities. Most of them were pleasant enough. They made a good impression. And now we realize that by the standards that came later, they weren’t really greedy. They just wanted a nice house and a family in the suburbs.

* College was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place.

* That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.

* When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Answer: The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All these guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.

IT TOOK A WHILE BUT THE SMART GUYS ( THOSE WITH HIGH IQ ) FINALLY DID IT -— THE COLLAPSE OF WALL STREET !!

[I am Richard Brandon]

Fits right in with my personal theory that Harvard and Yale are responsible for ruining the country if they havn’t already finished the process.

[FastCoyote]

It was both the smart guys (I tried to be for a billionaire here but he was too stupid. long story). But the only way the balloon could happen is with government protecting the failures. Fannie and Freddie and Fed pumping etc all added fuel to the fire.

[eclecticEel]

My 401(k) is intact. I got out of the market 8 or 10 years ago, when I saw what was happening

That would mean he took his savings off the market during the dot com bust, which means he lost a lot of money and apparently lived by the addage of "buy high, sell low" - if he really knew half as much as he claimed he would have left his money in for another 4-5 years, recouped his losses and then sold before the latest bust.

This is all ignoring that as you get closer to retirement age a lesser portion of your 401k should be invested in stocks. Nothing to do with any specific conditions; the stock market is always volatile, it goes up and it goes down. If you need your investment to be secure than place it anywhere but stocks.

[TopQuark]

Oh, what a nice story -— must’ve been written by O’Henry for the NYTimes... It’s hard to find another article that would be similarly devoid of content (facts and logic).

[dashing doofus]

It reads like a Jayson Blair “article.” What stupidity.

[parsifal]

Oh No! It was all those poor people and the CRA and poor widdle bankers being forced to make bad loans. (/s)

Here’s a link on how they did the math:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102325715

parsy, who says people never learn

[VideoDoctor]

Is this a NOVEL ( He was a well-preserved, gray-haired man of about retirement age, dressed in the same sort of clothes he must have worn on some Ivy League campus in the late ’50s or early ’60s — a tweed jacket, gray pants, a blue button-down shirt and a club tie that, seen from a distance, seemed adorned with tiny brussels sprouts. or a news story.?

The NY Times is irrelevant.

[junkbond]

The article does have some valid points.

Consider this analogy. Wall Street, up until about the end of the last decade, was run by guys like GW Bush. He is personable, a jock, and popular but maybe lacking the soaring “intellect” of the nerds. Most importantly, since he is already well liked (and wealthy) he does not need to demonstrate to others, for his own ego, how successful or smart he is. GW (or an old school Wall Street executive)was comfortable being competent and did not need constant adoration from his peers to stroke his ego.

Beginning in the 90s though, Wall Street began to bring in more Obama types. Sure they might be smart, but they are socially maladjusted. They resented and resent the jocks popularity and pleasing personality. As a result, they put constant pressure on themselves to best the jocks by displaying their intellectual superiority. This display often is manifested in the implementation of academic theories when pursuing profits rather than Wall Street common sense. The theories are arcane, barely-tested under real world conditions, thus subjecting the firm to out-sized risks.

[Blind Eye Jones]

If they are from the lower third of their class how are they so smart to be called smart guys?

[Jackie]

.
Oh! How I used to rant and rave about derivatives around here twelve years ago.
.

[Bernard Marx]

Calvin Trillin is the elitist Left's favorite humorist. He's been a fixture at the New Yorker and The Nation for years. For years he contributed an anti-conservative "poem" to The Nation every issue. Here's an example:

Dick Cheney

On the other hand, sometimes he gets it right:

Polanski

[Anti-Bubba182]

This is a BS story but it was fun.

[supercat]

It seems to me that much of the complexity in many parts of the financial sector exists primarily for the purpose of concealing quasi-legal fraud. If one cuts away the crap, it's clear that in many cases the reason money was "lost" is that it was stolen, while smoke and mirrors were used to conceal the theft. Huge sums of money wasn't lost in September of 2008. That may be when the losses became known to the general public, but the actual losses had occurred much earlier.

It is possible for markets to generate real wealth. Buying resources at a time and place where they are plentiful, and selling them at a time and place where they are scarce, creates real wealth. That is the only way that pure markets create wealth (but it's a huge one). Any money which someone gets out of the marketplace without generating real wealth comes out of someone else's pocket. One really wouldn't have to look very hard at things like the mortgage markets to see a lot of people making pretty obscene amounts of money for actions which didn't generate any wealth (and in fact destroyed a lot of it).