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Archive for April, 2010

everywhere else…

Here I go again about the Goldman Sachs suit. This time, it’s a narrative. John Paulson of  Paulson Investments decided he wanted to "short" [bet against] the CDO Market. He put together a collection of CDO’s [RMBS – Residence Mortgage Backed Securities] that he thought would fail. He shopped around for a MarketMaker to put […]

financial quixotics

For reasons that I don’t understand, I seem to want to know what the Synthetic CDO that Goldman Sachs is being prosecuted for really was, and that’s not easy, I’m discovering. The blurb in Wikipedia about Synthetic CDOs seems clear, until I try to say it back to myself: A synthetic CDO is a complex […]

short sightedness…

Selling short: I ‘borrow’ a stock share and sell it. I wait for a time, then buy the stock [hopefully at a lower price] and return it to the lender. There are may ways to do this kind of borrowing, but the point of ‘going’ short is always the same – I make money if […]

a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job

the boys from GS&CO… Looking back on things, we all now talk about the ‘housing bubble‘ as if it were an entity. Many of us even now know what the Case Shilling Index measures [the current value of a house]. But as this graph shows, there wasn’t a housing bubble. There were housing bubbles, widely […]

in big trouble…

Reading through the SEC Filing against Fabrice Tourre and Goldman Sachs, it sure sounded like fraud to me. But I found this article, which fleshed out some of the legal issues in the case and made things clearer ["clearer" is a relative term with me when it comes to matters legal]:   Inside the SEC’s […]

gold man’s sacks…

I think I might have a personal problem with aggression because every time I turn on the Goldman Sachs hearings, after only a brief time, I either turn them off, or go to another room. I’ve tried to refine what my problem is, but I can’t figure it out. It happens whether it’s a Senator, […]

the axis of evil ignorance and the war onf terror…

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety Benjamin Franklin Perhaps, in our zeal to explain the why of the Bush Administration, we skip over the most obvious of things – irrespective of why they did what they did, the what was, at its best, […]

the diplomatic side had prevailed…

No, I’m not going to post every sexual abuse case that gets reported from the Catholic Church. I’m posting this one for a reason. The Pope’s defenders are pointing out that he did try some to deal with the sexual predators in the church in his earlier days, but was unsuccessful in overcoming the prevailing […]

from vows of silence comes a great noise……

  Yesterday, I was reading about the Legion of Christ, a Catholic Organization founded in Mexico in 1941 by Fr. Marcial Maciel [with the lay organization Regnum Christi]. Here are some of their ‘vows’: 177. The first duty of a legionary is to love and esteem the Legion. As Nuestro Padre says, it is not […]

pseudoscience meets religion……

Expert agrees that pedophilia is linked to homosexuality Catholic News Agency April 22, 2010 Santiago, Chile, Apr 22, 2010 [CNA].- The newspaper, El Diaro de Chile, published an article last week by Spanish psychologist Jose Maria Amenos Vidal titled, “Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and the scientific evidence that supports the relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia.”  The […]