From 2010: My then-contemporary take on the Great Recession-in-Progress: Is This Really Our Proper Timeline? These days I wake up. Bleary-eyed, I stumble down the stairs. And... the macroeconomic situation hits me.... This has to be some horrible mistake.... And then I stare unproductively at the wall for a while as I try to piece together how exactly we got here... 2021 UPDATE: I must say, this really holds up very, very well indeed:
A well-constructed history of the financial crisis. It should go in a book sometime.
Re: “Hey! Look at these AAA CDO tranches! They pay 10 basis points more than Treasuries! We can hold them as Basel Tier I capital! That's free money!” And they never turned around and asked their own issue departments the natural question: “Just what dreck have you and your peers at other banks been persuading Moody's to rate as AAA these days, anyway?”
Isn't this just a more sophisticated version of the junk bond financing that Mike Milken was peddling in the 1980s? It created easy financing for corporate raiders and caused a significant rise in corporate leverage. Eventually rigging the market resulted in Milken's fall from master of the universe to pariah. Plus ça change.
A well-constructed history of the financial crisis. It should go in a book sometime.
Re: “Hey! Look at these AAA CDO tranches! They pay 10 basis points more than Treasuries! We can hold them as Basel Tier I capital! That's free money!” And they never turned around and asked their own issue departments the natural question: “Just what dreck have you and your peers at other banks been persuading Moody's to rate as AAA these days, anyway?”
Isn't this just a more sophisticated version of the junk bond financing that Mike Milken was peddling in the 1980s? It created easy financing for corporate raiders and caused a significant rise in corporate leverage. Eventually rigging the market resulted in Milken's fall from master of the universe to pariah. Plus ça change.