Friday, November 14, 2008

Confessions of an I-Banker

Really interesting article by Michael Lewis. Excerpts:

This woman [Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney] wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own..

...

...In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.


But that's not what the essay is about, it's about the one guy who saw it coming and made a killing shorting the hell out of these guys.


In other news, no one has made the FDIC failed bank list as yet- an increasingly rare occurrence on a Friday.