Taibbi FTW

Earlier this week, Jake DeSantis, an executive at the AIG Financial Products division, quit, and published his resignation letter in the New York Times. Matt Taibbi has the ultimate response.

DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano's toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn't even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn't, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

There's the big piece of fiction, that DeSantis knew nothing about the exotic financial deals at his 377-person unit, but had to be retained (and compensated with a bonus) to unwind those very same exotic deals. Then there's this other fiction that DeSantis and other Wall Street bonus babies could have gotten all kinds of other good offers from competing firms, even though half of Wall Street is out of work at the moment. But Taibbi focuses on the third argument:

But all of this is really secondary to the tone of DeSantis' letter. He acts like he's a victim because he didn't get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes:

"None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house."

First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down -- well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.

Out in the real world, when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client. It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble -- only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off after the hostile takeover, no matter how ill-considered the mortgages lent out by your division were.

That sense of entitlement has sparked the public anger. It's part of a mindset that assumes the virtue of selfishness and striving for the most dollars as an end in itself. It leads to perversities like Goldman Sachs bailing out their own executives even while the company was being bailed out themselves. It leads to self-interest being valued over the public interest. And it's led, in a very real sense, to the current crisis.

Scumbag Millionaires

You can be forgiven for wondering why Bernard Madoff would try to steal billions in the first place. He was already rich and well-respected, and none of his investors would have complained, presumably, about losses in the midst of the economic collapse of the past few years. But what's coming out in the past 48 hours, about how Madoff had signed checks totaling $173 million ready to pass off to employees at the time of his arrest (I'm assuming to hold it for him), and how he's been mailing jewelry and watches SINCE his arrest, suggests that he's just one of these "greed is good" thieves who always needed more, no matter his position or standing.

The detail was provided in a court filing Thursday as prosecutors argued that Madoff should have his bail revoked and be sent to jail. They said the checks were further evidence that he wants to keep his assets away from burned investors.

In the filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt said Madoff cannot be trusted because he had long engaged in a "scheme that required the defendant to lie routinely to thousands of people and a scheme which has caused extraordinary damage to individuals, families, and institutions all over the world."

The judge will now decide whether Madoff should be sent to jail or remain free on bail in his luxury Upper East Side penthouse.

I would say jail at the very least. And some investors or the US Treasury could use all those assets, too.

As for what to do about the larger problem of financial industry fraud, the SEC is broadening their investigation, and even Republican Congressmen are talking about a "statutory and regulatory structure for the 21st century." I would hope that this doesn't narrow into a solution about how to stop Ponzi schemes. The sickness lies in the lack of regulation throughout the financial services industry. Here's what the President-elect had to say about it, and I think it's largely on point.

Obama: Well, by the time that G-20 meeting takes place, we, I believe, will have presented our approach to financial regulation. I think some international coordination has to be done. But right now, we just have to take care ... (unintelligible) ... and Wall Street has not worked, our regulatory system has not worked the way it's supposed to. So it's going to be a substantial overhaul. We're going to have better enforcement, better oversight, better disclosure, increased transparency. We're going to have to look at this alphabet soup of agencies and figure out how do we get them to work together more effectively. We've got to stop splintering functions in such a way that capital in one form is treated one way and capital in another form is treated another way, because these days in global financial markets, they're all fungible. And there's systemic risks that are possible, whether it's in the form of derivatives or insurance or traditional bank deposits. So we've got to update the whole system to meet the needs of the 21st century. This is an assignment that my team is already beginning to work on and I think that we will have, fairly shortly, a package that we've worked alongside Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, to present to the American people.

This is the perspective we need. The failure of the SEC to recognize the Madoff crime is shameful, especially considering the warning signs were there and investment officers were actually trying to warn them. But the real failure is that the financial industry as an institution was disinclined to blow the whistle.

What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it. It wasn’t just Harry Markopolos who smelled a rat. As Mr. Markopolos explained in his letter, Goldman Sachs was refusing to do business with Mr. Madoff; many others doubted Mr. Madoff’s profits or assumed he was front-running his customers and steered clear of him. Between the lines, Mr. Markopolos hinted that even some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have suspected that they were the beneficiaries of a scam. After all, it wasn’t all that hard to see that the profits were too good to be true. Some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have reasoned that the worst that could happen to them, if the authorities put a stop to the front-running, was that a good thing would come to an end.

The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system, which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of checks and balances to discourage it. “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isn’t the greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many.

(More here.)

You can say much the same about credit default swaps, or mortgage-backed securities, or the credit-rating industry, or any of the instruments and institutions that failed the country. In short there was nothing stopping them from maximizing their own interests and insulating themselves, not the economy, from risk. The problem is bad incentives, and they directly stem from free-market fundamentalism without limits or controls. It's a system where cheerleading is encouraged and dissent is verboten. Where the interests of the shareholders are subservient to the interests of the bondholders and the CEOs. And that MUST change. To quote Gordon Brown, one of the few leaders on the global scene during this crisis:

The prime minister said 2008 would be remembered as the year in which "the old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out". In his traditional new year message, Brown struck a tone of tempered optimism, saying that Britain can this year build a better tomorrow through strategic investments while dealing with the dangerous challenges of today.

He said: "The failure of previous governments in previous global downturns was to succumb to political expediency and to cut back investment across the board, thereby stunting our ability to grow and strangling hope during the upturn. This will not happen on my watch."

Absolutely. 2008 was the year when free market dogma became so toxic it nearly swallowed up the entire financial system and the fortunes of untold millions. Madoff is not an oddity; he's an EXAMPLE. An example of what can never happen again.

The Sadness Of Alan Greenspan

Today our ex-Master of the Universe had his "nobody could have anticipated" moment.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called today for imposing some of the same sorts of regulations on mortgage securities he resisted when he was in office, acknowledging that the current financial crisis had exposed "a flaw" in his view of how the world and markets function.

The absence of significant controls on how mortgages are repackaged into larger and more complex securities has been cited as a central cause of the current financial crisis.

In testimony before the House Government Oversight Committee, Greenspan said that as a result of the current situation the United States is heading for a "significant rise in layoffs and unemployment" and a continued downturn in home values as the world works through a crisis that is "broader than anything I could have imagined."

Greenspan, who called the current financial crisis a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami," said that he remained "in a state of shocked disbelief" that banks and investment firms did not do a better job of analyzing the risks involved with investing in home mortgages extended to less creditworthy borrowers.

Under questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, Greenspan acknowledged that the failure of that expected self-regulation represented "a flaw in the model" he used to analyze economics. "I was going for 40 years or more on the perception that it was working well."

Here's that key moment.



Is he really this stupid? He predicated his entire economic philosophy on the premise that greedy people wouldn't act greedily? This free market fundamentalism might work in computer simulation, but in the business world you pretty much have people who want to get ridiculously rich as a matter of projecting power. Also, to suggest that Greenspan had just nothing to do with hyping adjustable rate mortgages and deregulation is absurd. This is his problem and he ought to be slow roasted for it.

If men were angels, no laws would be necessary, to borrow a phrase. But regulation exists for creeps like this:

CONVERSATION OF THE DAY....Between Rahul Dilip Shah and Shannon Mooney, a pair of analysts at the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, chatting via IM back in 2007:

RDS: btw: that deal is ridiculous

SM: I know right ... model def does not capture half of the risk

RDS: we should not be rating it

SM: we rate every deal

SM: it could be structured by cows and we would rate it

I actually don't think Greenspan is this dumb, he just wanted to let the party keep going until he retired or died so he wouldn't have to be pinned with the blame. Tough break, Alan.

Digby is great on this.

Being able to pass on all your risk to someone else while personally coming out on top is a pretty glaring and obvious flaw in the system unless you think that wealthy people are too wise and moral to ever do such a thing. The only people who believe that are Randians and Joe the Plumber. Everybody on Wall Street certainly seemed to know the score and acted accordingly [...]

Uncle Alan is in his 80s and he's just learned that his heroes aren't what he thought they were after all. No wonder he's in a state of "shocked disbelief." It's a wonder he didn't keel over.

I know people are focused on Hank Paulson and what a poor job he's doing, but focus some attention back on this Randian fool Alan Greenspan. He deserves to have his entire reputation destroyed.