30% of Bear stock was held by its own employees. At the end of the week that stock was selling for $30 a share; J P Morgan was offering $4. ibid.
This time it was the investment bank Lehman Brothers. ibid.
Moral Hazard trumped systemic risk. ibid.
The world’s largest insurance company AIG had invested tens of billions of their insurance profits in risky investments tied to the housing market. ibid.
With the market crashing, Congress felt intense pressure to reconsider Paulson’s plan to buy the toxic assets. ibid.
Paulson said the entire banking system was in trouble. ibid.
Moral Hazard was a thing of the past. ibid.
They created the largest bank in America. But it was troubled from the beginning. Government took over. Frontline: Breaking the Bank, PBS 2009
2008: The markets were teetering. Nobody knew how bad it was going to get. On one weekend in September the entire American financial system would be changed. ibid.
[Henry] Paulson would push the bankers to handle the Lehman crisis on their own. ibid.
[John] Thain realised he had no choice: he agreed to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $50 billion. ibid.
Lehman Brothers was headed for bankruptcy. ibid.
Paulson had bet the markets would take care of themselves; he would soon discover he was wrong. ibid.
Paulson received the money – $700 billion known as TARP – Troubled Asset Relief Program. ibid.
Paulson gave each man a single piece of paper spelling out the conditions. ibid.
In one day everything had changed. ibid.
The marriage between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch was already showing signs of strain. ibid.
Merrill’s toxic assets were eating a hole in the balance sheet. ibid.
Long before the economic meltdown the story of one woman who tried to warn about the threat to the financial system. Before the toxic assets poisoned the economy, she warned of their danger ... Alan Greenspan v Brooksley Born and The Warning. Frontline: The Warning, 2009
Reagan made Greenspan the most powerful banker in the world – the chairman of the Federal Reserve. ibid.
In 1993 Bankers’ Trust, one of the largest banks in the country at the time, had sold derivatives to Proctor & Gamble. The lawsuit set the stage for a stunning revelation: Bankers’ Trust employees took advantage of the fact that derivatives were too difficult to understand. ibid.
Trillions of dollars and the biggest banks in the country operating in secret. ibid.
Born’s warning became a prophecy. (Money & Economy & Banks & Finance & Business & Lend & Loan & Credit & Wall Street) ibid.
The Wall Street banks were pressured to bail out LTCM themselves. ibid.
Some in Congress began to clamour for regulation. ibid.
Alan Greenspan had no intention of yielding. ibid.
Congress did decide to do something about Brooksley Born – they stopped her entirely. ibid.
Wall Street was largely left to regulate itself. ibid.
Who creates new money? How does new money get into the economy? And what is debt really being used for? RichPlanet TV: The Monetary System with Ian Crane
Fractional banking: the game-plan right from the outset is to asset strip ... You put the money in which is owed back to you ... with interest. ibid.
North Dakota today is the only state in the United States of America that has a Bank of North Dakota that is owned by the people of North Dakota. ibid.
We are staring into the abyss ... Anybody who believes the Euro can survive is living in loo-loo land. Ian R Crane, interview On the Edge, AlexG
The reason they get their bonuses is the same reason everybody else gets their bonus and that is they did exactly as they were asked to do which is effectively to destroy the economy of the respective countries. ibid.
Ten years ago the price of gold was £275 an ounce ... Gordon Brown was instructed to sell 415 tons of the UK’s gold reserves ... [to] the Rothschilds. ibid.
There is enough money in the world to make everybody a millionaire. Money: Who Wants to be a Millionaire? bloke on settee, BBC 2011
Thousands of others are flocking to wealth seminars. ibid.
A considerable part of Robert’s wealth comes from teaching other people how to get rich. ibid.
‘It’s not about the money, it’s about the mindset.’ ibid. bloke in coffee shop
4In households across the country money causes more arguments than anything else. Money: Couples, BBC 2011
Does raw human emotion dictate your financial decisions? Or are we rational calculators of our own self-interest? Nova: Mind Over Money, PBS 2010
Our behaviour is bizarre when it comes to money. ibid.
So what did Adam Smith mean by ‘rational and self-interested behaviour’? ibid.
This link with emotion makes many rational economists reject the idea of bubbles. ibid.
Keynes said emotions could cause prices to soar and then collapse. ibid.
We are living in very precarious times. Americans are being robbed blind and they don’t even know who’s doing the robbing. Frank Farah, WorldNetDaily online
All goods must therefore be measured by some one thing ... Now this unit is in truth demand which holds all things together. Aristotle
We need to reconsider and rethink perhaps the very foundations of our economic and monetary system. Professor Quentin Taylor
Too much cheap money sloshing round the world. Wall Street 1987 starring Michael Douglas & Charlie Sheen & Daryl Hannah & Martin Sheen & John C McGinley & Terence Stamp & James Karen & Hal Holbrook & Sean Young & James Spader et al, director Oliver Stone, opening scene
I never knew how poor I was until I started making a little money. ibid.
Money is one great pain in the ass if you ask me. ibid. son to father
The main thing about money, Bud: it makes you do things you don’t want to do. ibid. father to son.
How much is enough? ibid.
You want to know what the mother of all bubbles was? It came out of nowhere by chance. They called it the Cambrian Explosion. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps 2010 starring Michael Douglas & Shia LaBeouf & Josh Brolin & Carey Mulligan & Eli Wallach & Susan Sarandon & Frank Langella & Austin Pendleton & Sylvia Miles & Venessa Ferlito & Jason Clark et al, director Oliver Stone
He’s out with a new book and it is a shocker, believe me. It is called Is Greed Good? ibid.
Guys, we’re looking at an unprecedented meltdown now. ibid.
Three-quarters of the banking houses at this time are holding the same paper, and you are going to let Keller Zabel fail? ibid. Lou at the Federal Reserve
What about Moral Hazard? ibid. Bretton
You’re pretty much fucked. You don’t know it yet but you are the Ninja generation: no income, no job, no assets: you’ve got a lot to live for too. ibid. Gekko’s lecture
Greed is good: now it seems it’s legal. ibid.
They’re WMDs: they’re weapons of mass destruction. ibid.
And the beauty of the deal: no-one is responsible. Because everybody is drinking the same Kool-Aid. ibid.
The mother of all evil is speculation, leveraged debt. ibid.
It’s a bankrupt business model: it won’t work. It’s systemic, malignant and it’s global, like cancer. ibid.
No-one else in this market has had the balls to commit suicide. ibid. Gekko to Jacob