Wall St. protests

[tinselwolverine]

Shoot Red, it was MichChamp!!

My eyes must have been playing tricks on me or something - I thought I saw your name next to that parody of my shirtless drunken tirade from my iPad lying on my couch in Beverly Hills having no concern for social and economic justice but instead merely dreaming of big boobs.

Now that I see it was from MichChamp, please everybody disregard any serious response I made to it - it's fucking hysterical!!!

 

[tinselwolverine]

Now that I see it was from MichChamp, please everybody disregard any serious response I made to it - it's fucking hysterical!!!

Oh, except, a little bit, about my hesitancy to accept on the face of it without further understanding of how the fee process worked with regard to securities ratings that there necessarily was a conflict of interest - not that I'm denying there was a conflict of interest - again I don't know.

Right out of college, I actually worked in financial services myself - I got hired by Dean Witter and was a Series 7 registered rep for a couple of years.

I was hired during the mid-80s, when Dean Witter was expanding its registered rep base because the firm had been acquired by Sears, and they were looking to staff little satellite Dean Witter offices in the Sears stores themselves.

Now, I was just a stock jock, sitting there in the Sears store at Briarwood (I was still in Ann Arbor then), primarily handling retirement account rollovers from folks who had been life long rank and file employees of the auto companies.

So, while I know a little something about what the Standard & Poors's of the world do, I was never anywhere near anything that involved dealing with anyone at any ratings agency regarding what standard and customary industry practices were; so, again, I'm hesitant to assume that the payment of fees for ratings necessarily portended a conflict of interest without knowing details about it.

Vic has clarified things quite a bit, though, and amongst us, he would be the one to know.

 

[Michchamp]

TinselWolverine[/color]]

even though I initially denied the rating agencies had any conflict of interest

Red, could you please copy/paste and note the post number that you're copy/pasting from that is a specific denial of anything?

Seems to me I merely have been asking for substantiation and corroboration of other people's claims - what's wrong with that?

Paragraph 3 of the New York Times article might show evidence of a conflict of interest - but it might not necessarily, and I'll explain to you why.

I worked a number of years in publishing, primarily for newspapers, among them was the Los Angeles Times - I worked in ad sales, circulation management, and public relations.

There is an entity known as The Audit Bureau of Circulation, that verifies paid circulation for publications.

Publishers then sell ad space based on that circulation number.

Now, the publishers pay fees to the ABC - but if anyone were to claim there was a conflict of interest because ABC might "risk losing business" from a lower than desired circulation count it would be absurd - it would be vastly more damaging to the publisher to not have a verified circulation count than it would be for the ABC to lose that publisher's fee - the publisher wouldn't be able to sell advertising space!

So - is it the same with S & P and the securities issuers? Would it be vastly more damaging to the securities issuer to go to the market with unrated securites than it would be for S & P to lose the fee?

I don't know.

Standard and Poor's ostensible underlying business has always been financial news - securities ratings came out of that.

Now - maybe there was a conflict of interest - I don't know. I would have know more about the specifics of the payments of fees, the interactions of individuals between S & P and the securities issuers, and obviously the overall operational revenues of S & P as a whole.

But the statement "Critics pointed to a conflict of interest" itself isn't necessarily evidence that there was one.

I believe so. The main issue here is that certain entities, pension funds, retirement funds, and the like are prohibited from investing their massive funds in securities that are not AAA. So if you wanted to sell them some investments... they would have to be rated AAA. If, for example, you had junk bonds you needed to unload, or say, risking securities comprised of mortgages with high likelihood of defaults, you would either have to find some risk-taking junkie with a lot of cash on his hands ready to gamble, or find some way to pass BBB securities off as AAA

SO... the banks create these nearly worthless subprime mortgage backed securities. They were nearly worthless because they contained mortgages that had high rates of default, e.g. these no-money down adjustable rate deals.

Now, after the banks create these things, they need to sell them to SOMEONE because lord knows they don't want to hold toxic assets like that on their own books.

Here comes the fraudulent part: the banks (being the issuers of these securities) need them certified AAA in order to sell them to mutual funds, pension funds, etc. etc. They need to get the official ratings agency's (S&P, Fitch, Moody's) to rate them AAA.

The ratings agency's - corrupted by the massive conflict of interest between their professional duty to objectively rate the creditworthiness of securities, and their desire to keep the banks which they depend on for ratings revenues happy, go along with what the banks want, rubber stamping all this stuff AAA based on assurances from Goldman Sachs.

Lewis' book details all this. The fact that the people working at the ratings agencies were also incompetent doesn't excuse the fraud & conflict of interest, but in this case it exacerbated it; it made doing their jobs more difficult. It also made them more susceptible to the high-pressure sell job from the banks. Think of the high school nerd getting pressured to steal shoes by a couple hot shots on the basketball team...

and Lewis' book also shows how the banks went even FURTHER than just selling bad securities, by chopping up the bad securities they created and RE-SELLING them as different securities...

 

[tinselwolverine]

Then, Lewis - or somebody - ought to contact the White House, or the Department of Justice, and let them know all this.


Because President Obama is under the impression that nobody on Wall Street broke any laws in the leadup to the financial meltdown.

I heard him say it on television myself last week.

 

[Michchamp]

TinselWolverine[/color]]Then, Lewis - or somebody - ought to contact the White House, or the Department of Justice, and let them know all this.


Because President Obama is under the impression that nobody on Wall Street broke any laws in the leadup to the financial meltdown.

I heard him say it on television myself last week.

no, they are aware; they either don't care or don't have a problem with it.

going after Wall Street is political suicide; and Holder does what his boss tells him, or he would be out of a job.

I hope the Wall St. protests can really start to generate a political cost for NOT being accountable to the general welfare of the nation and it's laws... there currently isn't one.

 

[Michchamp]

TinselWolverine[/color]]Then, Lewis - or somebody - ought to contact the White House, or the Department of Justice, and let them know all this.


Because President Obama is under the impression that nobody on Wall Street broke any laws in the leadup to the financial meltdown.

I heard him say it on television myself last week.

no, they are aware; they either don't care or don't have a problem with it.

going after Wall Street is political suicide; and Holder does what his boss tells him, or he would be out of a job.

I hope the Wall St. protests can really start to generate a political cost for NOT being accountable to the general welfare of the nation and it's laws... there currently isn't one.

also, by all measures, Obama has received more Wall Street money than any other current elected official or candidate.

I guess in his defense, at least he wasn't as easy to buy as Mitt Romney, Phil Gramm, Chris Dodd, John McCain...

 

[deathroh]

The truth finally comes out... occupywallstreet = teaparty, just another politically funded faux-rebellion.

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-behind-wall-st-protests-110834998.html

 

[redandguilty]

The truth finally comes out... occupywallstreet = teaparty, just another politically funded faux-rebellion.

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-behind-wall-st-protests-110834998.html

Meh.
Soros gives money to Tides, Tides gives money to AdBusters. $185,000 over 10 years isn't that big a deal, even if you want to say the Tides money that went to AdBusters came from Soros. Soros says the money he gave Tides was for something else anyway.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/1....e =domesticNews

 

[Michchamp]

The truth finally comes out... occupywallstreet = teaparty, just another politically funded faux-rebellion.

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-behind-wall-st-protests-110834998.html

Meh.
Soros gives money to Tides, Tides gives money to AdBusters. $185,000 over 10 years isn't that big a deal, even if you want to say the Tides money that went to AdBusters came from Soros. Soros says the money he gave Tides was for something else anyway.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/1....e =domesticNews

no kidding. but it doesn't matter... the media has the story they need for the real right-wing conspiracy theorists. they'll believe pretty much anything once you punch up and article with the right keywords: "Soros" + "liberal shadow government" + protests + "Tides Foundation" = BINGO! Wall Streeeeeet isn't the problem! They did nothing wrong... this is all the work of that dastardly GEORGE SOROS who stands to make BILLIONS from this. Or something. LOOK OVER THERE!

now they just need to keep working on the rest of the population... getting harder and harder to discredit the movement.

 

[deathroh]

The truth finally comes out... occupywallstreet = teaparty, just another politically funded faux-rebellion.

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-behind-wall-st-protests-110834998.html

Meh.
Soros gives money to Tides, Tides gives money to AdBusters. $185,000 over 10 years isn't that big a deal, even if you want to say the Tides money that went to AdBusters came from Soros. Soros says the money he gave Tides was for something else anyway.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/1....e =domesticNews

Well of course that's what the liberal media is going to tell you. You shouldn't be so weak minded. If only we had Glenn Beck to work this out for us on his famous chalkboard.

 

[Michchamp]

$185,000 over 10 years is a lot of money, right? certainly enough to justify the connection.

I won't even try to think about the context and whether that money went to people protesting, not only in NYC now, but around the country. I'm convinced.

 

[hockeywings]

George Soros=>liberal media=>shit throwing monkeys=>great apes=>tad pols

TAD POLS ARE RUINING AMERICA!!!

 

[hockeywings]

sorry I was trying to channel Glenn Beck

 

[Michchamp]

sorry I was trying to channel Glenn Beck

solid effort.