Theme: Bankers
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM). Read more
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It has been noted repeatedly that almost no top bankers have faced serious consequences for their actions in the financial crisis. But there is a Wall Street corollary that might be even more pernicious: Good guys are punished.Read more
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The fiction of pervasive cluelessness is so vital to this movie’s very essence that the CNBC clips interspersed between scenes as a narrative device had to be “reread and, in some cases, reshot”—faked is another way of saying itRead more
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From an economic viewpoint, the most serious problem with the rescue programs was not that they further enriched the loathed bankers but that they exacerbated some serious incentive problems at the heart of the financial system. By extending trillions of dollars in loans, capital injections, and debt guarantees to troubled firms, the US government and its counterparts overseas had greatly extended the public safety net for banks and other financial entities. Left unchecked, this expansion will surely lead to more blowups, followed by even bigger bailouts. Read more
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During the winter of 2008-2009, when I was just feeling my way through the first story I was writing for Rolling Stone about the financial crisis, I started to notice something amusing. One of the keys to talking to sources about any subject is clicking with their sense of humor, and I was noticing that with a lot of the financial people I was calling, I was missing laugh cues whenever anyone mentioned the investment bank Goldman Sachs. No one ever just referenced "Goldman"; they would say "those motherfuckers" or "those cocksuckers" or "those motherfucking cocksucking assholes at Goldman, Sachs." Read more
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