For some of this, you can just say, well, OK, they made a bad business decision and got swindled. Everyone on Wall Street was fooled at the time. But this sort of thing really gets me: How the...
For some of this, you can just say, well, OK, they made a bad business decision and got swindled. Everyone on Wall Street was fooled at the time. But this sort of thing really gets me:
“Nobody beats Wall Street estimates exactly by a penny 24 quarters in a row,” he remembers warning Williams of CUC. “That’s categorically impossible. Does not happen.”
How the hell do people see this and not immediately think, "Yeah, this is obviously fraudulent!"?
There's a book called No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos, who was the guy who uncovered Bernie Madoff's scam. The guy (rightfully) has a giant chip on his shoulder, and the book is his giant...
There's a book called No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos, who was the guy who uncovered Bernie Madoff's scam. The guy (rightfully) has a giant chip on his shoulder, and the book is his giant "I told you so!" to pretty much everyone who ever ignored or doubted his warnings (including the SEC).
I bring it up because Madoff, like CUC, had an overtly suspicious track record, and Markopolos repeatedly talks about how so many people turned a blind eye to it out of greed. There was no way they couldn't have known he was doing something shady, but the deals were just too good, so they went along with it. Many of them thought they were getting away with it, and for a while they were, up until the floor fell out from underneath them.
The movie "The Big Short" is a pretty entertaining (dramatized) coverage of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, and one of the major themes in it is just how many people and companies really should...
The movie "The Big Short" is a pretty entertaining (dramatized) coverage of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, and one of the major themes in it is just how many people and companies really should have known the whole thing was a nonsensical house of cards, but they all didn't care because they were making so much money by going along with it.
Even when everything actually starts collapsing, the value of mortgage-backed bonds/etc. stay high for a while against all logic, and the people who saw the crash coming are just baffled by it. Here's a clip from that section of the movie, where they go to one of the rating agencies to try to get them to explain why they're still giving the bonds the highest rating even though they're literally worthless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwdo17GT6sg
It's a pretty good movie, watching a couple of clips makes me want to go watch it again.
For some of this, you can just say, well, OK, they made a bad business decision and got swindled. Everyone on Wall Street was fooled at the time. But this sort of thing really gets me:
How the hell do people see this and not immediately think, "Yeah, this is obviously fraudulent!"?
There's a book called No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos, who was the guy who uncovered Bernie Madoff's scam. The guy (rightfully) has a giant chip on his shoulder, and the book is his giant "I told you so!" to pretty much everyone who ever ignored or doubted his warnings (including the SEC).
I bring it up because Madoff, like CUC, had an overtly suspicious track record, and Markopolos repeatedly talks about how so many people turned a blind eye to it out of greed. There was no way they couldn't have known he was doing something shady, but the deals were just too good, so they went along with it. Many of them thought they were getting away with it, and for a while they were, up until the floor fell out from underneath them.
The movie "The Big Short" is a pretty entertaining (dramatized) coverage of the 2007/2008 financial crisis, and one of the major themes in it is just how many people and companies really should have known the whole thing was a nonsensical house of cards, but they all didn't care because they were making so much money by going along with it.
Even when everything actually starts collapsing, the value of mortgage-backed bonds/etc. stay high for a while against all logic, and the people who saw the crash coming are just baffled by it. Here's a clip from that section of the movie, where they go to one of the rating agencies to try to get them to explain why they're still giving the bonds the highest rating even though they're literally worthless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwdo17GT6sg
It's a pretty good movie, watching a couple of clips makes me want to go watch it again.
Because the fox is in charge of the henhouse. It's a willful blindness.