The Los Angeles Times quotes R&R Consulting's Sylvain Raynes on the lessons learned -- or not-- in the financial industry one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. "[Raynes] became an early critic of the excesses in the so-called structured-finance market. Now, instead of creating the...
The sight of New Yorkers sunning themselves on lawn chairs in the middle of Broadway almost made me swallow my cigar. I could not believe that hundreds of pedestrians, swarming among each other like killer bees, were lounging in the middle of a street famous...
R&R Consulting's Sylvain Raines comments on plans by veteran investigator Jules B. Kroll to create a new credit rating agency. Read the full article by Geraldine Fabrikant, "Corporate Sleuth Plans to Start Credit Rating Firm," The New York Times, August 28, 2009....
Over the past few weeks of this summer of discontent, the search for sub-prime villains has grown ever more intense and sordid. Media-bound auto da fe has been set up to burn the most obviously flawed Wall Street personalities at the stake of incompetence, allegedly...
The 2008 taxpayer bailout and a long string of corporate restructurings and downsizings have shifted risk from corporations to individuals. Most Americans were caught in a high-stakes Monopoly game where they didn't know the rules. Read the full article on the Carnegie Council website....
"Why do healthcare costs rise as much as they do? What, specifically, is driving it?" This was the question posed to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean by Maria Bartiromo during his appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe program on July 27. Dean’s response: "The private sector doesn’t...
"Is the financial system stable enough yet to fix itself?" In a Fortune article exploring this question, R&R's Sylvain Raynes sees the prospect of a CIT Group bankruptcy as a new beginning. "There is still value in CIT that can be picked out if the...
R&R principal Sylvain Raynes calls for the government to take the lead in weaning the financial markets off their reliance on rating agencies. Reuters reports, "The Obama administration has said it wants markets to reduce their reliance on ratings after Moody's Investors Service, Standard &...
Public interest journalism blog ProPublica interviewed R&R's Sylvain Raynes regarding reports that AIG has sold off dozens of subsidiaries in order to repay the $85 billion it owes American taxpayers. "There's nothing wrong with private transactions between consenting adults," Raynes said, "But when the government...
Bloomberg quotes R&R's Sylvain Raynes on Morgan Stanley's plans to repackage a downgraded collateralized debt obligation into new securities with AA ratings, the first transaction of its kind: "A lot of banks and insurers 'cannot buy anything but AAA,' said Sylvain Raynes, a principal at R&R...