Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
Michael Lewis submitted this satiracal op-ed piece to the NY Times.
Shockingly, the Senate version of the bill more or less would require us to cease to trade derivatives entirely. This unpleasant idea was introduced by Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and it leads me to a point that is worth underscoring: We do not have a problem with the American people, we have a problem with American women. Elizabeth Warren, our TARP supervisor, continues to ask questions about what we did with our government money; Mary Schapiro has used her authority at the S.E.C. to sue Goldman Sachs. Of the four Republican senators who crossed over to vote with the Democrats, two were women — and one of the guys posed naked for Cosmopolitan magazine.
Tags: Financial reform, Wall Street
Posted in Finance, Politics, Wall Street | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Michael Lewis and his new book The Big Short were profiled on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Link to story and audio [8m 59s]
“You have this body of facts out there in the financial world, and the vast majority of the people in that world are organizing the facts into one kind of picture — and it’s a pretty picture. And a handful of other people take the exact same facts, but they organize it into a different picture.”
Tags: All Things Considered, The Big Short
Posted in Finance, Wall Street | No Comments »
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Wall Street bonuses in the current climate are a “very elegant form of theft” former bond trader Michael Lewis tells Steve Kroft. 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 14 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Link to excerpt on CBS.com.
Link to part 1 and part 2 of the 60 Minutes episode on Hulu.com.
Tags: 60 Minutes, The Big Short
Posted in Finance, Wall Street | No Comments »
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
ML’s latest satirical column on Bloomberg.
Each year, for example, Goldman Sachs might announce a grand national competition, much like “American Idol.” Finalists will appear before a national television audience to be judged by a panel of three rather ordinary looking Goldman executives. On stage they will perform various Wall Street tricks: negotiating with Tim Geithner, lobbying the Senate Banking Committee, designing securities that blow up, selling bonds to Germans, etc.
The winner receives a job at Goldman Sachs.
Tags: Goldman Sachs, Michael Lewis
Posted in Wall Street | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
ML takes a jab at the almighty Goldman Sachs in his latest satirical column on Bloomberg. Tip of the hat to Matt Taibbi’s article in this month’s Rolling Stone about Goldman:
Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.
For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs — nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does –ever happens by accident.
Tags: Goldman Sachs, Michael Lewis
Posted in Wall Street | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
August, 2009 Vanity Fair article investigating the implosion of A.I.G., Michael Lewis explains how one of the world’s safest insurers became a reckless juggernaut—and a national target.
Link to Vanity Fair article
Tags: A.I.G., AIG, credit default swaps, economic crisis, economy, Finance, Jake DeSantis, Joseph Cassano, Michael Lewis, Subprime, Vanity Fair
Posted in Finance, Subprime, Wall Street | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria talks to ‘Liar’s Poker’ author Michael Lewis about the economic crisis and future of Wall Street.
Fareed Zakaria:GPS interview, June 7, 2009 (16 min 12 sec)
Tags: economic crisis, Fareed Zakaria, Finance, Michael Lewis, Wall Street
Posted in Finance, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Vanity Fair (April 2009 edition)
Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy-its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance-resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.
link: Wall Street on the Tundra
And bonus quote:
“Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”
Posted in Finance, Wall Street | No Comments »