Selected writings by David Fiderer
Dear Justice Department, So far, major investigations by the S.E.C., by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and by the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations have let the rating agencies off the hook. They found that the agencies were far less diligent and conscientious than they should have been, and were therefore slow to appreciate the implications of the real [...]
In his latest Bloomberg column on Goldman Sachs, William Cohan makes an important point: "Goldman hasn't made its internal analysis public, nor does it intend to, but it has showed the documents around town (including to me)."
When it comes to AIG's liquidity crisis, Wall Street's conventional wisdom absolves Goldman from blame. Goldman's people, so the story goes, were smart and therefore prescient about the declining values of CDOs. So their demands for cash margin from AIG, which insured billions of toxic CDOs for Goldman's benefit.
How did Fannie and Freddie lose so much money? There are many reasons, but the two most important ones are Alt-A and interest-only loans, which generated most of the losses. These are not products for low or moderate-income borrowers. But they are products that invite fraud. Reports by the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the St. Louis [...]
“Poor me!” decried Warren Buffett. “I’m forced to pay more income taxes than everyone else in my zip code! Why should everyone else get a free ride?” Because of his affirmative action mindset, which measures tax burden according to headcount instead of income, he was unable to evaluate fiscal matters in a mature, adult [...]
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as an honest case for extending the Bush tax cuts. Ten years of hard data prove they were a complete failure. They did not work while Bush was in office and they did not work during the first two years of the [...]
Joe Cassano is a very good liar, which is why it would be so hard to prosecute him for perjury. When testifying before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the former head of AIG Financial Products kept blending in half-truths with his audaciously dishonest claims, so that the overall effect was nonsensical. For instance, to justify [...]