Still, he gives no information and the speech takes place in a Greek Orthodox Church.
Didn’t realise that the Greek Orthodox Church was such an interesting place to hang out.
I wonder, as a matter of interest, did any Pinsters invest in CDSs based on the probability that the sub-prime market would default? You’d have probably made a nice few bob.
I’ve edited that comment from my post until I hear some more. That said, I do believe that capitalism has failed and whether the capitalist system can be salvaged at this stage remains to be seen.
The thing I can’t understand is how this is so far off-the-radar.
It’s a NY Post titbit with a few blogs picking it up. How did this not get picked up by the financial press? Are they waiting for confirmation of a NY Post story? It’s gotta be easy enough to go to the source. Was it misrepresented/misreported? Surely SOP would be to get the correction out and if anyone raise the issue point them to it.
If its like the Madoff case then he probably presented the evidence to the SEC a while ago and the SEC is now dragging its feet. My guess is he is going public as a way of upping the ante so as to force the upper level SEC bureaucracy to do the right thing.
I have some suspicions as to what he might be talking about. I posted before on Angelo derivatives where the Group total book was some 5 bn lower than the Bank book. To me that suggests that Angelo was writing derivatives to itself (AIG style), but not hedging them (AIG style). AIG turned into a magic money-shitting machine through its derivatives and its ability to underwrite its risks internally, giving it far lower costs.
If AIG can do it, why can’t everyone else? Sure what harm is there in it?
Ah found it, it was just an aside, but it has preyed on my mind since. johnboy’s comment may be accurate, but I think that would imply a larger book rather than a smaller one (i.e. notional value takes no account of netting?). viewtopic.php?p=230022#p230022
AIG was slightly different, they only made money as long as the did not have to post margin. Lose your AAA rating, post margin, and poof goes $200 billion…
Anglos double booking of inter group contracts could also be used to hide trades done by subsidiaries, partnerships or other types of investment vehicles that blew up.
Maybe the 6 billion hole in BOI’s cashflow this year gives us a benchmark for just how large a loss they are trying to hide at Anglo. BOIs trading book did not double in the space of a year or two and they still lost than much money.
