I was a nice guy until I became a landlord. I smiled a lot and said "Good morning" and "How you doing?" and patted the dog occasionally and my wife more frequently. Then I became responsible for the lives of tenants and it all changed....
A review of Contagion: The Financial Epidemic That Is Sweeping the Global Economy…And How To Protect Yourself From It, by John R. Talbott John Talbott has established a well-deserved reputation as a financial soothsayer, enjoying an incredible run of spot-on predictions. He called the imminent bust...
"If everybody is playing by the same set of rules, whether you are talking about loan origination or securitization, then it becomes very hard to game the system. The lack of definitions is a huge problem… If the Congress, the SEC and the FASB, and...
Bloomberg commentator David Reilly quotes R&R's Ann Rutledge on the next target for regulators in mending the financial crisis: the "shadow banking system" of non-bank lending markets. Rutledge calls for "an exchange-like setting to provide the sort of standardization and rules that help trading of stocks...
The revealing and esthetically pleasing chart that R&R's Ann Rutledge produced to illustrate asset-backed bond default rates is featured by Felix Salmon in his Reuters blog. Reflecting the value of analyzing the past in dealing with the future, Ann's presentation on the development of the...
It wasn't Dr. Krugman's hate-mail treatment of securitization that made my brain go tilt.(I say this even though we concur with Barry Ritholz’s reasoning in his blog article, "Paul Krugman is Wrong About Securitization." )What really got to me was the reference to toaster...
R&R's Ann Rutledge discusses how flawed securitization set off the economic crisis in the cover story of the current issue of National Journal Magazine:"Until the early part of this decade, Rutledge says, most of the blueprints for building structured securities were imperfect but honest. Sometime...
"'Banks can pay bonuses without eroding capital if they were funded from profitable trades that were settled through financing provided by the government to AIG,' said Sylvain Raynes, a derivative consultant in New York and author of The Analysis of Structured Securities."Read the full article:...
At this very moment, throughout this great land of ours, ordinary people dwelling far away from the chaotic nonsense known as Wall Street are probably wondering how so much money could be wasted by so few people -- people who, in fact, live in another...
The March 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal quotes R&R's Ann Rutledge calling for rating agencies to develop new ways to rate debt as they benefit from the government's bailout program:"[Rating agencies] are still paid for their ratings by the companies whose bonds they...