Glad you're back!

I was shocked when Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, and other (in my opinion lesser) Banks were saved.

From Larry McDonald's email to me about his book:

I am exposing the few that HURT so many. Over 2 million jobs lost since Lehman failed. This NEVER should have happened!

The product description on Amazon.Com says:

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers—right from the belly of the beast.

In A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald’s Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts “gateway to nowhere” housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world’s toughest trading floors.

We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation’s oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it.

The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America’s—and the world’s—financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.

Can't wait to read this one!

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• The importance of saving Lehman (economist.com)

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Came across  an interesting reference to The Black Swan (see my earlier entry) on MSN/Newsweek (Posted August 15)

Daniel Gross writes on "Speaking Hedgie: Translating the strange dialect of hedge-fund managers who are trying to explain big losses."

Hedge-Fund Phrase: Unprecedented, unique circumstances
Translation: Stuff happens. But we had no clue.

Anyone who read the best seller The Black Swan  [I did, and highly recommend it] knows that random geopolitical, financial, and economic events can cause the prices of assets to move in ways that defy history and sophisticated computer models. But it comes as a shock to the brightest minds on Wall Street, especially those who run quantitative-based funds.

"Wednesday is the type of day people will remember in quant-land for a very long time," Matthew Rothman, head of quantitative equity strategies for Lehman Brothers told the Wall Street Journal last week.

"Events that models only predicted would happen once in 10,000 years happened every day for three days."

Strangely, these same models failed to predict the once-in-10,000-year events that roiled the markets in 1997, 1998, 2001, and 2002.

Daniel Gross writes for Newsweek and Slate, and has a book on economic bubbles, one of my new favorite subjects:

In an interview David Bach did with Bankrate.com, he discusses the cost of mortgage refinances. (David Bach is the author of the Automatic Millionaire series of books, and is, not incidentally, a former senior vice president at the Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley.) "You have to factor in all the closing costs for a refinance. There is no such thing as a no-cost loan. The loan documents, the HUD-1 settlement statement details it all." And my favorite: "...There are more good mortgage loan people out there than bad. It's a very regulated industry." You can read the full article at http://www.bankrate.com/