Quote:
Originally Posted by sugarpop
You misunderstand. I was not blaming Geitner. I was saying I don't know that much about him (like I don't know much about Larry Summers or Robert Rubin), but he was in charge of one of the Federal Reserve Banks, and is supposedly one of those bright people, so what did he know?
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It was not their job to know. It was their job to blow the whistle. However we built a system where accounting fraud (Enron accounting) is now legal. Look at what Geitner did when he finally walked into Bear Stearns to discover what was going on. He and his staff worked all night. Then at 4 o'clock AM, he called Benanke. Woke Bernanke up to announce ‘Pearl Harbor’. Bear Stearns was wall to wall junk.
Did the Wall Street executives know this years ago? Of course. What did they do? One (Merrill Lynch) even fired the messenger. They even created dummy companies to move losses into. Then claimed those companies as assets on their spread sheets. This is acceptable behavior if trained as a stock broker, investment banker, or MBA. Why are stock broker investment recommendations not to be trusted? Why do so many stock brokers recommend mutual funds to ignorant investors?
How do you know the company is in trouble? CEO comes from the finance department. Carly Fiorina who was running HP into the ground. She also was dumb because her education was MBA. Look at Rick Wagoner at GM. He never ran an single profitable operation in GM. But he was a finance guy his entire carrer. So they made him the top liar in GM. Look at the guys who replaced Herb Greenburg in AIG. The guy who created risk management was basically forced out so they could buy massive CDOs for increased profits and completely disregard the risks.
Again, I asked three important questions. Questions asked because the answers are paramount. Three questions. You saw the impending housing crash in 2005? What do Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac do and why? What is the purpose of a company? Three questions that make obvious what has happened. I await those answers that better define this mess.