Krugman Finds His Nut(s)?
Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker
As in "a blind squirrel finds one – once in a while."
(With apologies to the person who posted it on TF under that title before I got to Tickering this – heh, I had to go get my teeth cleaned, so give me a break already! :))
But in fact Krugman hasn’t found his nut(s), although he should check. He’s groping around down there…. perhaps he could come up with something if he’d just take the next logical step from here:
The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private.
No Paul, that’s not reality either. Your liberal mind just can’t get its tiny little wings around what really happened, so let me help you.
You can start with my Ticker entitled "The Audacity of Synthetics", in which I explain to the proletariat what any self-respecting "economist" (or "economic reporter") should already know about, but which I’ve yet to hear you opine upon:
But this leaves open the question of whether it is fair, just, or even legal to create a synthetic security that at it’s core comes into existence because someone believes that the reference is going to detonate, and then sell off pieces of that security to investors without prominently disclosing the source of the funding of the cash flow, that they proffered the criteria for inclusion in the reference and that the INTENT of their funding was to profit from an EXPECTED detonation of the reference securities.
It also leaves open the question of laying off that risk on an insurance company (whether in a regulated subsidiary or not) without similarly disclosing the above to them up front! That is, is it fair, just (or even legal) to buy fire insurance on a property when you have been told that someone expects a fire in that structure based on what they believe is credible analysis (e.g. a look at the wiring plan), without telling the insurance company about what you were told?
THAT is what happened Paul.
These Banksters didn’t just make bad bets, have them blow up in their face, and then come crying to the government.
Oh no.
They, for various purposes (all of which devolve down into "profit for me!") created securities of various sorts, many of them with no actual asset behind them but rather pure gambling contracts, and then sold them without disclosing everything they either knew or should have known in a full, fair and reasonable fashion to the people they sold them to.
Do you care to re-think exactly how outraged you ought to be Paul?
