Breaking: World shocked as Wall Street is found self-interested and incestuous

Reader comment on: Confidence Game

Submitted by curmudgeonly troll (United States), Aug 9, 2010 22:02

OK, what about the substance of Ackman's research? MBIA was at the center of a fraudulent enterprise while the SEC and other regulators looked away, despite Ackman's very public efforts. The gist was that mortgage buyers, sellers, the guarantee company (MBIA), and the rating agency would willingly suspend belief to manufacture 'AAA' securities that miraculously paid far more interest than corporate AAAs, all of them got fees, and 'lucky' subprime borrowers could suddenly access unlimited credit without adequate income or collateral.

In any fair world, the people who shouted warnings, like Ackman, Paulson, Chanos, Eisman, Einhorn and others, would be respected, and the people who perpetrated the fraud at MBIA and elsewhere would be answering for what they did.

Speculators may be motivated by their own interests, but they knew what they were doing. Hedge funds didn't really blow up more than one would have expected and some were successful. Meanwhile, broker-dealers (Madoff, Lehman, Bear), S&Ls (WaMu, Countrywide, a host of others), insurance companies (AIG) - who were supposed to be the conservative business types, were actually taking hedge fund risks on the public dime.

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