Sunday, January 10, 2010

Vampire Squid's CDOs

"'The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going into default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,' said Sylvan R. Raines, an expert in structured finance at R&R Consulting in New York. 'When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else's house and then committing arson'," Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story at the NYT, 24 December 2009, link:

Yves Smith (YS) comments on this article at her Naked Capitalism, 24 December 2009, are well worth reading, link: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/goldman-deutsche-and-the-destructive-use-of-synthetic-cdos-comes-into-focus.html.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We all know Goldmanites would short their mothers for anything over a 100bp.

Lord Blankfein probably thought he was doing "God's work" by blowing up those "low credit score" securities...