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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (160499)	2/12/2009 4:11:20 PM
From: cirrus	1 Recommendation Respond to of 362592

I appreciate your thoughtful replies. I'll look up Tanta's posts if they're available. It's been my experience that whenever an executive declines to explain a financial or other strategy because "it's too complex" for those outside the priesthood to grasp or involves "trade secrets" or some other nonsense like that... it usually means he's stealing. The S&Ls made that "complexity" claim in the 70's as did Ken Lay and Enron (aka the smartest guys in the room) in the 90s. The oil barons did it to us in 2008 when asked to explain the rise in gas prices and the mortgage industry, it seems, has been screwing us for quite some time, saying that these financial instruments are "complex". My guess is that when all the fluff and disinformation is eliminated we'll find that the core concepts of these mortgage backed securities are quite simple and can be summarized in a flowchart prepared by a first year accounting student. Of course, the bankers want it to remain "complex" for the time being so they can reap large fees from the government for their "professional expertise" required to untangle the very mess they created. An oversimplification, perhaps, but not by much. The bottom line is that the underlying assets, homes, are NOT worthless, and some patient folks are going to become quite wealthy as a result of the financial convulsions now taking place.