Political Stuff
Monitoring Our Money-Soaked Politicians
Stephen Blackwell :: Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 1:30 pm
Politico’s front page is ablaze today with coverage of our politicians’ multi-faceted connections with Wall Street.
I spent well over 10 hours this past weekend reading every piece of coverage possible on the SEC fraud case against Goldman Sachs. I understood 37% - 52% of everything I read, and I can still safely say that, after two years of obsessively reading about this stuff, plus my weekend bender, I possess only the vaguest notion of what a collateralized debt obligation is, the difference between it and a synthetic version of itself, how these relate to credit-default swaps, or how traders created any of it in the first place. (Full disclosure: I majored in English.) So when the perfectly named Goldman Sachs vice-president, Fabrice Tourre (he self-references as Fabulous Fab), declared via email that not even he understood the full implications of his “monstruosities,” I became profoundly depressed. MORE »
