The Great Love of Demi Moore & Ashton Kutcher

Each time I happen upon pictures of Demi & Ashton, they never fail to bring a smile to my lips. I love the great relationship they have....Despite their age differences, it is quite apparent the love and adoration one sees in both their eyes.. I'd like to see their love lasts till the end of time...Their love story is better than any other public ones I have ever read....Those who have experienced any "great love" in their lives are so very very lucky indeed.....WON.

Gorgeous Day @ the Beijing Botanic Gardens, 2009/03/28

Dear Students & Family:
I am extremely happy that some of you brought your family to the Beijing Botanic Garden today. The signs of Spring are everywhere -in the buds of flowers, in the new growth of leaves, in the feel of the breeze, in the warmth of the sun... We got to enjoy the many light breezes that kissed and caressed our faces and cheeks every now and then. I loved listening to your laughters and looking at the smiles of your faces as we go a-walking, a-talking and a-wondering...Perhaps we could do it again this late Spring or early summer, have a lovely picnic, with tents and such, and more of us participating....May life be as tranquil as this we experience today...

By clicking on the link below, you can access all the pictures I have taken today...download any one of interests to you...Would love it if you write your comments here, in Chinese or English.

For my foreign friends, BBG is located on the NW of Central Beijing. It is one of the largest public garden ground in the world. It is generally crowded from Spring till the end of Fall, on weekends. There are much to do and see within the botanic ground. There are Rose Gardens, Peonies Garden, a tropical hothouse, a very large open-air circular theatre-like water fountain display surrounded by rose climbers which is extremely popular with parents and children during the hot summer months, several small waterfalls, and streams, one of which "leads "uphill to the top called the "Origin of Water," several lakes, pavilions. There is supposedly a home of the famous Chinese author who wrote the well known literary classic called "Dream of the Red Chamber." In addition, there is the world's largest singularly carved from a trunk of the Sleeping Buddha at the Sleeping BuddhaTemple. That part of the temple is itself surrounded by many centuries old Cypress trees. There is also a quaint courtyard-like hotel where many corporate meetings are held, many footpaths that criss-crosses throughout the entire garden. One can also see many kinds of Spring flowers that are commonly found in Southern California too and rows and rows of tulips near the hothouse....I'm sure you get the picture....So should you come to Beijing, that is a place not to miss. Actually you do not need to join a tour group when sightseeing around Beijing since most places of interest are reachable via subway or express buses....Regards, WON

http://picasaweb.google.com/BeyondDesiderata/BotanicGardenVisitMarch282009?feat=directlink

AIG Still Isn't Too Big to Fail

Dear Students & Friends:

Below is a business related article that we can learn something and be smarter about - one thing about this financial and economis crisis - we are learning much from the mistakes of others -apply this knowledge wisely in your future life and endeavours...Regards, WON.


AIG Still Isn't Too Big to Fail

By LUCIAN BEBCHUK WSJ March 20, 2009

The AIG bailout -- at $170 billion and rising -- may end up as the costliest rescue of a single firm in history. There is much debate about bonuses paid to AIG's executives. But there is far too little debate on the government's willingness to back all of AIG's obligations.

The company claims any failure by the government to do so would have catastrophic consequences. This claim is exaggerated. Serious consideration should be given to forcing AIG's partners in derivative transactions -- which are mainly buyers of credit default swaps from the company -- to take a substantial haircut.

AIG is a holding company, conducting most of its business through insurance subsidiaries organized as separate legal entities. The financial products subsidiary, which has produced the huge losses from derivative transactions that brought AIG down, is also a separate legal entity -- but AIG has guaranteed the subsidiary's obligations.

While AIG has thus far been able to cover derivative losses using government funds, the possibility of large additional losses must be recognized. AIG recently stated that it still has about $1.6 trillion in "notional derivatives exposure." Suppose, for example, that AIG ends up with losses equal to, say, 20% of this exposure -- that is, $320 billion. Suppose also that the value of AIG's current assets, including the shares in its insurance subsidiaries, is $160 billion. In this scenario, the government's fully backing AIG's obligations would produce an additional loss of $160 billion for taxpayers. Should the government be prepared to do so?

The alternative would be to put AIG into Chapter 11. In this case, AIG's creditors, including its derivative counterparties, would obtain the company's assets. They would end up with a 50% recovery on their claims, bearing those $160 billion of losses themselves.

AIG recently stated that failure to meet all of the company's obligations could lead to a "run on the bank" by customers seeking to surrender insurance policies and "would have sweeping impacts across the economy." But insurance policyholders wouldn't be at risk if AIG failed to meet its obligations. The insurance subsidiaries are not responsible for the debts of their parent AIG, and insurance policy claims are backed both by the subsidiaries' required reserves and state insurance funds.

Still, what about the concern that losses to derivative counterparties -- which are now known to include major U.S. and foreign banks -- would substantially deplete the capital of some of them? That concern would be best addressed by the U.S. government (or foreign governments in the case of their banks) infusing capital directly -- in return for shares -- into the banks that need it. There is no reason to back AIG's obligations as an instrument for infusing capital (with taxpayers getting nothing in return) into, say, Goldman Sachs or Spain's Banco Santander.

It is true that the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September led to a crisis of confidence among depositors in banks and money-market funds, which had a dramatic effect on markets. Letting AIG's derivative counterparties take a significant haircut, however, should not lead to such a crisis. AIG's obligations are to derivative counterparties, not to depositors. Moreover, governments world-wide are now committed to backing fully the claims of depositors in financial institutions.

It is important to understand that the government can also employ intermediate approaches between fully backing AIG's derivative obligations and no backing. For example, the government could place AIG in Chapter 11, but commit to provide supplemental coverage that would make up any difference between the value that creditors would get from AIG'S reorganization and, say, an 80% recovery. Such an approach could allow setting different haircuts for different classes of creditors. The government, for example, might elect not to provide such supplemental coverage to executives owed money by AIG.

At a minimum, the government should conduct "stress tests," estimating potential losses in alternative scenarios, and formulate a policy on the magnitude and fraction of derivative losses it would be willing to cover. A policy that doesn't fully back AIG's obligations should be seriously considered.

Mr. Bebchuk is a professor of law, economics and finance, and director of the corporate governance program at Harvard Law School. This op-ed is based on his forthcoming paper, "Is AIG Too Big To Fail?"

Memoirs of The Last Day of Class...

Hi Folks:

Having had to do so much reading for my work project, I decided to take a short break and read my email. A friend of mine had apparently went into Baidu to google my name, and found that one of my graduate students at the Central University for Nationality in Beijing, China had written something about me on the last day of class.

It made me laugh now reading about it....so I have copied and pasted it here for those of you who reads Chinese....it is unedited of course....& thank you, my student, whoever you are who wrote it...But, you should know that you were wrong on 2 points - that is -

1. 像我"这种性格的人” decided to make Beijing my last and final home。。。

2. 你的老师是先去日本留学， 才到纽约的。是从加州， 跑到北京来的。。姑娘，你没听好老师说的话，所以在作业上没给你满分啦。老师就是这样的“事儿精”.....呵呵

Anyway,老师也挺想你们的.....祝好！WON

字体大小：大中小 正文
Natassha Hu(2007-06-29 21:14:05)
分类：神游类

今天是上研究生英语课的最后一天，也许这辈子都不会再上英语课了，有点小怀念列。呵呵

虽然大家在上课的时候对外教Miss Hu多有抱怨，觉得她做事太趋于程式化，用北京的话说就是“事儿精”。但是结课了对她仍有些许不舍。仔细想想，Miss Hu也给我们带来了许多乐趣。

最佩服的是她的经历，在我们看来，可能有点传奇吧。作为一个新加坡人，在美国纽约和加州生活了十多年，在华尔街工作过，因为看不惯加州人的拜金主义，东渡到日本求学（学习服装设计），现在来到中国。我想她应该还会继续游历别的国家，这种性格的人是不会永远安于一个地方的。

还记得为了讲清make of 和make from的区别，给我们讲木质的东西时，脱下她那沾满灰尘脏兮兮的凉拖，引起我们大家的一阵嘘声。

还记得她说她上大学的时候为了写清楚乞丐一天的生活，去街边做了一天的乞丐，虽然被饿的半死，但最后那门课得了A加。她还建议我们全班去北京天桥上排一长队，去感受一下乞丐的生活。

还记得她出作文题目“if I were a tree , I want to be ”,我们有很多同学写苹果树都会以牛顿结尾，她严厉地批评了我们这种毫无想象力的做法，理由是如果牛顿站在榴莲树下的话，他早被砸死了，根本不会有万有引力的诞生。理由充足吧。呵呵

全班分小组作了那么多的presentation,我们介绍了全国名胜古迹和少数民族风情，全班都对各个景点的历史和各民族的文化都有了大致的了解。

我们还一人读了10本名著书虫,作了一厚本笔记，这些都是我们的财富。
.........

好了，一段经历就这样落幕了，就把这它记录下来，封存为一段美好的回忆吧。

评论[发评论]
红袖添乱：2007-06-30 23:35:56

FT~~~~~~为什么你选了一张NH闭眼睛的？~~NH总的来说，对我们还不错起码最后那一节课放的ABBA的歌曲某乱还是觉得不错听的-。-

Populism's Virtues

Hello Again;

As soon as I finish reading this article, I thought "Bingo, Right On The Dot!" He took all the words out of my mouth, and so do read on. Am certain you will heartily agree. I highlighted in red those statements which are so true in today's societies, from the USA to even Singapore.
Anytime you see in parenthesis (WON), that's my comments in brackets. WON = short for World of Natassha.

Regards, WON.


By E.J. Dionne Jr. The Washington Post
Thursday, March 19, 2009; Page A15

Conservatives have argued for decades that the sins most dangerous to our society were rooted in lust when in fact they were rooted in greed.

We are at the beginning of a great popular rebellion against those who showed no self-restraint when it came to lining their own pockets. Their entitlement mentality arose from an inflated sense of their own value and of how much smarter they were than everyone else.

The sound you are hearing in response to the AIG payoffs -- excuse me, bonuses -- is the rancorous noise of their arrogance crashing to earth.

Yet there is much hand-wringing that this populist fury is terribly perilous, that the highfliers who could not control their avaricious urges have skills essential to repairing the damage they caused in the first place. (WON: Yeah, right!)

Beware populism, we are told. Honor those AIG contracts. Forget about any moral reckoning and just fix the economy.

This view is wrong on almost every level, especially about populism. Of course not all forms of populism are attractive. But as historian Michael Kazin argued in "The Populist Persuasion," the "language of populism in the United States expressed a kind of idealistic discontent" and "a profound outrage with elites who ignored, corrupted and/or betrayed the core ideal of American democracy."

Is this not an entirely appropriate reaction to elite decisions dating to the 1980s that ultimately ran our economy into the ground?

The Obama administration has sent thoroughly ambivalent signals on this question. Its initial response to the $165 million in AIG bonuses (the president's lieutenants said there was little to be done about them) suggested that it did not want to join in the populist anger and maybe didn't even realize that it was there. On Monday, President Obama made clear that he got it, denouncing the bonuses.

It was the right first step. He should build on this by showing that he shares in the public's morally justified intuition that our society's rewards to the very wealthy are totally out of line with their contributions to the common good.

A study of compensation levels in 2007 found that average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies was 344 times higher than the average worker's wage, and that the top 50 investment fund managers took home 19,000 times -- yes, that's with three zeroes -- as much as typical workers earned. (WON - outrageous, isn' it. It's not just the USA).

Now, I am not against people getting rich or entrepreneurs reaping profit from their investments of time and energy. But there is no moral or practical justification for such levels of inequality. Capitalism worked extremely well in the three decades after World War II without such radical inequities. It's when inequalities soar that the system runs into trouble -- precisely what happened at the end of the 1920s, when inequality reached levels similar to today's.
With the populist furies unleashed, the Obama administration has two choices. It can try to fight the public. Or it can use the public's outrage to move the country in a better direction.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, points to the irony that populism threatens to work against Obama even though the president has proposed "a populist budget." It's a budget that raises taxes on the wealthy, cuts them on almost everyone else and spends money on programs -- notably health care -- that are of benefit to the poor and the middle class. Obama needs to show that his budget is itself a direct response to the injustices aggravating the country. (WON: Yes, absolutely!)

The president needs to do two things at once. The administration has no choice but to spend piles of money to unwind the financial mess. A share of the largess, as Frank acknowledges, may indirectly benefit some of the malefactors in this saga. But Obama has to be unambiguous in asserting that the purpose of this spending is not to reward those who got us into this fix but to solve a problem that affects us all.

To make this case, the administration should be unafraid to use its proposals on health care, taxes, education, energy and financial regulation to argue that it is building a new economy on the ashes of the old -- an economy based on fair rewards to capital and labor alike, not on an ethic of greed and excess.

Obama can work with the populist wave or he can be overwhelmed by it. As Kazin notes, American progressives have succeeded in improving the "common welfare" only when they "talked in populist ways -- hopeful, expansive, even romantic."

Kazin cites the line popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "March without the people, and you march into the night," and then adds: "Cursing the darkness only delays the dawn."

postchat@aol.com
Read E.J. Dionne's tribute to Ron Silver on The Post's opinion blog, PostPartisan.

President's Visits Buoy Federal Employees

Dear Friends / Family:

Whenever a country is in pain and suffering, the actions of its leaders can either bring hope, uplift morale and re-charge enthusiasm or not. Like the time in May last year, during China's Szechuan Province catastrophic earthquake, the quick actions of President Hu Jing-Tao, Premier Wen Jia-Bao & her leaders brought reassurances to those who were affected. Likewise, in these hard economic times in the US, that President Obama took the time to stop by Federal offices, especially that of the Veteran's Administration, is a step in the right direction (versus that of the previous administration). From comments listed in this article below, one sense the relief, hope, and the strong desire to be a part of Obama's team - the desire to help him change and erase the greediness and corruption over the last years.

And that is exactly what being a true leader is all about. Many CEOs of Wall Street and several large corporations can do well to heed this. The AIG fiasco - I would love to see all Americans call upon their Senators and Representatives in Congress to DEMAND the return of all Federal Funds from this and other companies.

Let these incompetently run companies really sink - sink into the abyss so that these executives can truly understand the meaning of losing one's job, losing one's home and losing one's families in the process. Perhaps that will teach them a lesson in humanity, in honesty and in humility.

Finally, in my opinion, the US$25 billion VA package should be passed immediately, and not over 5 years - take this from the money recoup back from AIG & other failing corporations! Why should the government reward those who are incompetent and do not make any sort of constructive contribution to America or the American people? ?

Incompetence begets further incompetence. Just like greed begets more further greed - this we all know from history.

In fact, all monies doled out should be retrieved and instead given to those companies and coporations in America who are doing an excellent job. These are the companies America wants and needs. They are the ones who saw this bubble coming. Reward those who do their jobs, not reward those who DO NOT do their jobs. That is the true meaning of capitalism... Regards, WON.


By Philip RuckerWashington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 17, 2009; Page A06

President Obama strode into a cramped room at the Department of Veterans Affairs yesterday, faced a few dozen employees in stackable chairs and spoke for 12 minutes. He made no news, shook some hands and hustled back to the White House, just two blocks away.

But his short visit to the department's Vermont Avenue headquarters rallied many of the 280,000 workers at an agency bearing the brunt of two long, ongoing wars. Hundreds of workers filled a basement cafeteria to hear him speak. A 29-year human resources specialist said the president made her believe she is part of his mission to change government. And a file clerk said Obama inspired her to believe she is more than a lowly bureaucrat.

"I'm just a file clerk," said Donnice George, a VA employee for 19 years. "He's a leader, he's African American, and he's president. It's something I never thought I'd see in a million years, and I feel like I'm a part of it. Just being an employee makes me feel a part of it."

Two months into office, Obama has visited seven federal agencies' headquarters, each time appearing with his Cabinet secretaries and addressing workers. As he makes the rounds, Obama is inspiring longtime career employees with his speeches and asking them to be a partner in his agenda to change the culture of Washington.

"There's clearly an excitement and sense that you have a president that is aggressively and optimistically moving forward with making government cool again," said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. "That's the charge that President Obama said he wants to meet, and across the board federal workers feel that energy and need to perform. . . . That sense of importance and a critical role is something I sense in the federal workforce."

At VA yesterday, employees, including several in wheelchairs, packed a two-story auditorium to sit behind a red-velvet rope line and hear Obama speak. The president, alongside VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki, marked the 20th anniversary of the former Veterans Administration's elevation to Cabinet-level status by reaffirming the country's commitment to veterans and calling for an expansion of services as troops begin returning from the Iraq war.

"The homecoming we face over the next year and a half will be the true test of this commitment: whether we will stand with our veterans as they face new challenges -- physical, psychological and economic -- here at home," Obama said.

In his budget, Obama proposes adding $25 billion to the VA budget over five years to help provide health care to an additional 500,000 veterans by 2013 and fund a new GI Bill.

"We'll show our servicemen and -women that when you come home to America, America will be here for you," Obama said. "That's how we will ensure that those who have 'borne the battle' -- and their families -- will have every chance to live out their dreams."

The thousands of employees who did not win tickets to see Obama watched him on television at the headquarters and at satellite offices and hospitals nationwide. Many workers said in interviews that the president gives them hope and that they come to work each day reinvigorated.

"When I heard rumors they were trying to get him here, I thought, no way," said Bill Bremby, a chief of property management who joined VA two decades ago, after 30 years in the Marine Corps. "I thought we were on the back burner. But now we're on the front burner. He gave me a lot of hope."

For Patricia Marshall, 54, an African American who voted for Obama, her job as a VA human resources specialist seems to have taken on greater meaning.

"I was a part of the process getting him elected, and now I'm part of his government, and he is my commander in chief," Marshall said. Changing government "is not going to be an overnight thing," she said. "What he has stepped into is like a hornet's nest. It's going to take time, but what he's doing is possible, and I'm part of the team."

Not every employee was as enthusiastic about the new president. Jerry Roberts, a program analyst, said Obama is "a good change for the nation." But asked whether Obama has changed the way he views his job, Roberts was more reserved: "I'll just wait and see," he said.

After Obama left the headquarters, employees gathered in conference rooms and the cafeteria to enjoy yellow sheet cake in honor of the departmental anniversary. Piedad R. Holmes, a budget analyst set to depart for Afghanistan as an Army reservist, was showing colleagues pictures of Obama she had taken to share with fellow troops.

"We'll be buoyed here for months," Shinseki said as he shook hands with employees.
"It's one thing to talk about how we're going to make change," Chanel Bankston-Carter, who directs the VA client service center, said in between serving slices of cake. "But to have a president step foot in here and want to be up close and personal and shake hands and tell you he's here with you, it's wonderful."

Standing outside the entrance, craning her neck to see Obama's motorcade, Peggy Kennedy, an 11-year veteran who is a national program manager overseeing social work, said, "He gives us a new hope, a new mission -- a joy."

Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth

Dear Friends/Family:

Like Carnegie, it is my belief that people of wealth should do their part in helping their less fortunate fellow citizens. By so doing, society will become a much better place. I was totally delighted when I came across Mr. Carnegie's writing, The Gospel of Wealth." It clearly explains the logic and advantages of doing so . I have copied and pasted the text below from the Univesrsity of Michigan site (listed below).. Enjoy! Regards, WON.


Carnegie Speaks: A Recording of the Gospel of WealthIn his essay “Wealth,” published in the North American Review in 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were duty bound to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. Carnegie’s essay later became famous under the title “The Gospel of Wealth,” and in 1908, at age seventy-three, Andrew Carnegie recorded a portion of it under that title.

Andrew Carnegie:

I quote from the Gospel of Wealth published twenty-five years ago. This then is held to be the duty of the man of wealth. First: to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him, and after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is strictly bound as a matter of duty, to administer in the manner which in his judgment is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.

The man of wealth must become a trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer. Those who would administer wisely must indeed be wise. For one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.

In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who help themselves. It provides part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give to those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise; to assist but rarely or never to do all. He is the only true reformer who is careful and as anxious not to lead the unworthy as he is to lead the worthy, and perhaps even more so, for in alms giving, more injury may be done by promoting vice than by relieving virtue. Thus, is the problem of the rich and poor to be solved.

The laws of accumulation should be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue. But the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it did, or would have done, of itself. The best in minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race in which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year-by-year for the general good. This day already dawns. Men may die without incurring the pity of their fellows, sharers in great business enterprises from which their capital cannot be, or has not been withdrawn, upon which is left entirely a trust for public uses.

Yet the day is not far distant when the man who dies, leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was free for him to administer during life, will pass away “unwept, unhonored, and unsung,” no matter to what use he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these, the public verdict will then be: the man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced. Such in my opinion is the true gospel concerning wealth, obedience to which is destined someday to solve the problems of the rich and the poor, to hasten the coming brotherhood of man, and at last to make our earth a heaven.

Source: Courtesy of the Michigan State University Voice Library.
Web link: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5766

Web link with more complete info of the Book Gospel of Wealth: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5767/

How America Got Herself Into This Financial Mess...

Dear Friends:

I read with total agreement the comments made by a Robert CT after watching the interview by Charlie Rose of Morgan Stanley Chairman & CEO John Mack (who happens to be Charlie's pal). It is greedy executives and the likes of John Mack who contributed to the erosion and decline of America - excessive greediness that knows no bounds.... Charlie Rose disappointed those of us who had watched his show....Nevertheless, here is the article that I have copied and pasted below....

robert_CT 02/26/2009 04:04 PM Report

“Nobody saw this coming”

Mack is an idiot! The history of markets is a history of bubbles and any CEO of a major financial firm that couldn’t see the biggest bubble in history doesn’t deserve a job.

I am a nobody with no special insight whatsoever yet I put 25% of my net worth into gold in late 2005 specifically because I thought that U.S. economic activity had reached an unsustainable frenzy and because I believed that such activity was built on a reckless and unsustainable increase in leverage.

I am not a “gold bug” and had never bought gold in my life. I feared a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system and believed and continue to believe that we may witness the insolvency of the U.S. government or a Weimar Germany style inflationary spiral which are really the same thing. Time will tell but this scenario is a possibility.

Furthermore I sold off all my financial stocks by October 2006 in anticipation that they would crash. While I wanted to short them I didn’t because being short is very challenging psychologically. I am now buying selected stocks including the financials in expectation that I will, with some luck, make at least a 500% return over the next five years. That is if the U.S. government doesn’t go insolvent, a real possibility, hence I continue to maintain by gold position.
So if someone like me had a sense of this impending disaster how couldn’t Mack see it? Has Mack ever heard of George Soros who warned of such a scenario beginning a few years ago. In addition, Soros has a view of markets that is at odds with the conventional economic dogma taught in American business schools and he has written several books outlining his ideas. Is Mack so dumb as to believe in the efficient markets theory?

I also note that Mack is one of the clowns who went to the SEC in 2005 and persuaded the SEC to change the regulations limiting the leverage for investment banks, thereby allowing MS to increase its leverage from approximately 12:1 to 31:1.

And there is no doubt that Mack is one of the fools, along with Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summer who argued against regulating credit default swaps and other derivatives.
Of course Charlie Rose is Mack’s buddy so none of these inconvenient truths come up in this interview.

I worked for one of the major investment banks for about 8 years in the early 90s and by my estimate only about 30% of the business activities at these firms relates to the real or productive economy. Sure they issue bonds and stock on behalf of real companies engaged in real economic activity but about 70% percent of what they do involves promoting hair brained mergers for the sole purpose of generating fees (i.e. AOL-Time Warner which I promptly shorted post merger); financing financings to generate fees (see CDOs and CDOs squared) and running speculative leveraged interest rate arbitrage portfolios (at the peak about 2/3 of MS’s, MER’s and LEH’s balance sheets consisted of nothing more than naked speculative interest rate arb positions which collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity). Then you have all the fee generating activities geared to private equity and hedge funds which are not part of the real economy but rather “helpers” to use Warren Buffet’s euphemistic term.

In reality private equity and hedge fund firms are parasites on the economy who have learned to use the banking system and capital markets to turn the real economy into a big game of monopoly for their benefit. In short the financial services industry became corrupted by greed, arrogance, hubris and more greed. The investment banking/banking industry needs to go back to what it was at one time. A legitimate business that promotes real economic activity by making markets on behalf of real investors and that raises money for real companies.

Mack, Fuld, and Stan O’Neal should be forced to forfeit every penny they made beginning from the day they increased the leverage of their firms above approximately 12:1 Then we can debate whether they should spend any time in a federal prison for destroying the savings and livelihoods of so many ordinary Americans. Don’t get me wrong there is lots of blame to spread around but these people were at the center of this calamity and it was all driven by sheer unmitigated avarice.

As it stands Wall Street is primarily just one big “pump and dump” operation, that lurches from one scheme to the next. After the dot com bubble Wall Street needed another scam to generate fees and massive bonuses and when Alan “the ideological fool” Greenspan lowered rates to 1% he laid the ground for Mack and company to gin up the next bubble. The problem this time was much worse than the dot com bubble because it was built on leverage, hence the calamity we are now living through.

I wouldn’t be nearly so angry about this if these people had any sense of shame or contrition but Mack seems so pleased with himself because of the three of four weeks he spent huddled in his executive suites working around the clock to save MS. It would have been nice if Rose pointed out to this jackass that the firm wouldn’t have needed saving if it weren’t for Mack’s stupidity and greed. In any event Mack’s idiocy and incompetent management allowed me to take a nice position in MS on Oct-10 for $7.00 a share. I can’t wait to bail out of this stock in a few years time at or near the peak of the next bubble assuming of course that we aren’t running around with wheelbarrows of worthless money by then.

Mack, Fuld, O’Neal, et al. want us to believe that the system was swept away by some unforeseeable event but the reality is that the financial system collapsed under the weight of its own greed and stupidity. Nice work guys!


Great take on the financial crisis, huh? Many of these executives and CEO really think the American public are stupid. It tells us that capitalist Americans are MORE corrupt, mean ande brutal than any others where this is concerned, and unashamedly so... The American People should feel indignant, and have the right to demand that justice be done - and soon. President Obama should have the right to fire existing officials or anyone in government who have had a hand in contributing to this terrible mess - even those he has just appointed. There is no shame in doing that.

I'd rather see a President admit his error and take immediate corrective action, than let an existing corrupt official continue doing further damage to America's economy. and this is probably what most Americans want too.

This financial crisis further convinces me that corruption exists everywhere, no matter the form of government a country has. The differences are in the degree. After this crisis, no one can point a finger at China anymore. At least, in China, the current leadership in government is stamping corruption out steadily...

And if these CEOs are in China, their heads will really roll....and that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what accountability is all about...

If you are one of my students reading this article, I want you to forward it to all your classmates and friends. Let them all learn from this, and not be sucked into this sort of corrosively, unethical behaviour. Let it be a reminder to "CAVEAT."

Regards,

NH

Let us Love Our Earth more...

Dear Friends/Family:

This morning, my dear, dear friend M.B. of Egypt sent this youtube video link to me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhaLMotfvqg

After watching it, I decided to post it in my blog - Why? Because this is an important plea that comes directly from the hearts of a small group of children, only 12-13, about the survival of Earth.

It is not only about their survival, but that of our children, our children's children, and also of us human beings, and all living things around us.

Do watch it... and please share this link with all your children and friends...If our politicians aren't doing much about it, let us at least give our kids the opportunity to do it for themselves right
now...

Let us Love Our Earth more,

Regards, WON
Beijing, China