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House of Cards

a Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
Aug 25, 2013StarGladiator rated this title 0.5 out of 5 stars
Rated AWFUL as a book of pure propaganda: ". . .how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system." Let's address these fictions of the author on an individual basis: risky bets? They were all rigged! Lax government regulations - - negative! It was by design, just see Greg Palast's release of the "Larry Summers' memo" at [http://www.vice.com/en_uk/larry-summers-memo] and research the lobbying by the top Wall Street investment houses (their Derivatives Research Group) and JPMorgan's and the Group of Thirty's lobbying to end "legal risk" for the credit derivatives' scam (resulting in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the GLB Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act). "Bad decision making"? When John Paulson got together with Goldman Sachs to create the trash loans/CDO construct called the Abacus CDO, then purchased millions of dollars worth of credit default swaps against it ($1.4 million per naked swap, with a payout of $100 million per swap) resulting in billions for both parties, and similar situation for the principals of Magnetar Capital hedge fund, with 96% failed deals, yet they made billions? Plus all the others who did similarly.... [Congressional investigations into the standard practices of Washington Mutual uncovered that they kept a "black list" of honest real estate assessors who WaMu WOULD NOT hire nor contract any work out to, as said assessors would not falsify RE estimates, et cetera. This involved financial fraud to the max, no poor decisions or any other such claptrap nonsense! One lady at WaMu, a senior mortgage underwriter, refused to OK faulty loans and was summarily fired!] Furthermore, "A tale of hubris" ????? What hubris? They got away with the largest financial fraud in human history - - is John Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Geithner, any present and past CEOs of Chase and Morgan Stanley in jail? Negative!!!