I am glad that you enjoyed this piece. You can access all of my writing by clicking on my LD byline and then clicking on “see authors posts”.

LD

While on Wall St. I traded mortgage pass-thrus that were issueds by Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie. The market that I traded provided liquidity to the secondary mortgage market.

When I was a salesman i covered large institutional clients and then managed our institutional sales effort at JPM. We sold the full array of mortgage related products, but with only a limited presence in the sub-prime space. The reason for that is that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPM made the decision that JPM would not originate much of that product. Wise move on his part.

The rating agencies were totally conflicted. They were paid by the issuers of the deals and were thus competing to get more deals. In competing for those deals, though, the issuers pressured them to cut corners in their ratings. Did they knowingly rate bonds too high? IMO, they neither had the human capital to fully appreciate the risks embedded in the underlying loans nor did they adjust ratings quickly enough as the market adjusted.

Certainly the ratings agencies “business model” needs to change and I am sure it will in 2009.

In regard to Paulson and AIG, much like the embedded losses within the banking system that nobody wants to fully and publicly estimate, nobody including Paulson wants to publicly guesstimate the losses at AIG. This particular situation is another case of massive systemic risk.

One wild ride on the way up and one massive and vicious unwind on the way down!

I think that we all need to be careful in the following:

1. managing our personal finances…
2. developing an understanding of what is going on in the economy.

I hope that those who are following our readings/radio here at NQ have been developing a stronger understanding of each of these points.

This video clip does touch on some issues that we have tried to highlight (honestly I wish that I was writing throughout the Summer to share my thoughts then but alas…)including:

1. struggling economy…getting worse before it gets better
2. inflation…when they say that the governments finances will collapse do not forget that the U.S. government has the ability to print money. We will not run out of money but the value of that money may very well decline. We have tried to consistently highlight this point throughout our writings/shows.

IMO, they are stretching when they talk about martial law, spying on average American citizens, and civil war.

I do think that crime will increase as people become more financially strapped. Could there be social unrest in certain towns/cities? Perhaps. Civil War? By including commentary on a topic like that along with martial law, I believe a clip like this loses a lot of credibility.

Hope these insights help. Again, they are merely my opinions but I think we want to remain levelheaded as we work our way through this.

Address those questions and I hope you can find your answer.

The point of your question, though, ultimately touches on the most important but often least publicized skill in investing and that is to maximize savings!!

Hope this helps.

This is the end of life as we have known it…now the Global financial new world order will take place shortly. It’s been in the works for a long time and they found Obama to be the front man for this plan. Kerry is in on it.

As for the ‘reputation’, so much is overlooked and the bar has been lowered so much that States are beginning to legislate “ETHICS” because the average person and company’s moral compass is shot to hell. Fudiciary duty and national registry’s with fingerprints are being enacted and soon to be nationwide.

The guy who MADE OFF with over 50B of other people’s money has the PERFECT name, don’t ‘ya think? His name is Mr Madeoff with all those people’s money.
I know someone who lost 8mm (his entire lifetime savings) that the Made Off company bamboozled…poor guy..he’ll be homeless.