“Ferdinand Pecora moment”

“…We have waited long and patiently for our Ferdinand Pecora moment – a modern equivalent of the episode when a tough prosecutor from New York seized the imagination of the country in the early 1930s and, over a series of congressional hearings: laid bare the wrong-doings of Wall Street in simple and vivid terms that everyone could understand, and created the groundswell of public support necessary for comprehensive re-regulation…that moment finally arrived…” Read this article here.

Get this…

“…Get this: Republicans met Wall Street bankers supposedly telling those crony capitalists that they would oppose financial reform on the fraudulent claim it contained a bailout fund, and Wall Street–ready for this one–lavished them with campaign contributions because they really did not want to be bailed out the next time they failed! What honor! What self-sacrifice! What patriotism! What crap!…” Read more here.

Goldman-Sachs plague continues…

Yes, the Goldman-Sachs plague continues, and now with the backing of the U. S. government. “…The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they’re back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they’re rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before…”

P.S: Doesn’t Goldman-Sacks remind you of the evil cat in a Mighty Mouse cartoon? Right?

Goldman-Sachs: Al Qaeda of Wall Street

You can read The Great American Bubble Machine here.

Beloved banana republic self-replicates banana status

“…The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system. It is a system that remains in place to this day. A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way. A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built. It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC. A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform…” Article here.

Is capitalism sicko?

I’m not a big fan of Michael Moore; but I’m even less of a fan of corrupt Wall Street and its sycophantic congressional lackeys

Bankers’ holiday Inc.

“I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard. Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained…” Read aticle here.

The physicists of Wall Street

“…Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs and became managing director, was a forerunner of the many physicists and other scientists who have flooded Wall Street in recent years, moving from a world in which a discrepancy of a few percentage points in a measurement can mean a Nobel Prize or unending mockery to a world in which a few percent one way can land you in jail and a few percent the other way can win you your own private Caribbean island…”  Crux of the story?  There is no EeualsMCsquared in the financial markets (most certainly  forget about unified field theories). Read the full story here.

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Looking for the science of Wall Street? Here’s a book I’m reading: A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market (and keep in mind the key word in the title: Plays ).