How Bank of America Screwed the Pooch With the Merrill Lynch Purchase

Cool article in Forbes looks at seven ways Bank of America failed its fiduciary duties to its shareholders in its purchase of Merrill Lynch:

By definition, these key decision makers are required to exercise a fiduciary duty to put the interests of shareholders first in all corporate decisions. When executives or boards fail to uphold this standard of loyalty, care and due diligence, shareholders can be financially harmed. Since the initial merger announcement last September, they have lost over $150 billion, and the sheer speed in which these sizable losses occurred, warrant further investigation.

And the people who blew it are still in charge!

"Produce the Note"

Found this clip from GMA on the website Blown Mortgage:



Blown Mortgage comments: Now, to me this just seems like a way to increase the costs of banks which in the end make home lending more expensive. And the woman who refinanced her home from $39,000 to almost $150,000 isn’t the shining example of responsibility; but when you’re desperate you’re desperate. Regardless if you’re behind on your payments or not you’re entitled to certain rights. One of those rights is the right to a copy of the note your signed.

Simple Splanation of the Financial Mess

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Exactly How AIG Came To Suck So Many Donkey Balls

Great article in the New York Times. A few interesting graphs:

To be sure, most of A.I.G. operated the way it always had, like a normal, regulated insurance company. (Its insurance divisions remain profitable today.) But one division, its “financial practices” unit in London, was filled with go-go financial wizards who devised new and clever ways of taking advantage of Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities. Unlike many of the Wall Street investment banks, A.I.G. didn’t specialize in pooling subprime mortgages into securities. Instead, it sold credit-default swaps.

These exotic instruments acted as a form of insurance for the securities. In effect, A.I.G. was saying if, by some remote chance (ha!) those mortgage-backed securities suffered losses, the company would be on the hook for the losses. And because A.I.G. had that AAA rating, when it sprinkled its holy water over those mortgage-backed securities, suddenly they had AAA ratings too. That was the ratings arbitrage. “It was a way to exploit the triple A rating,” said Robert J. Arvanitis, a former A.I.G. executive who has since become a leading A.I.G. critic.

Why would Wall Street and the banks go for this? Because it shifted the risk of default from themselves to A.I.G., and the AAA rating made the securities much easier to market. What was in it for A.I.G.? Lucrative fees, naturally. But it also saw the fees as risk-free money; surely it would never have to actually pay up. Like everyone else on Wall Street, A.I.G. operated on the belief that the underlying assets — housing — could only go up in price.

Read all of it - it's pretty nuts!