"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Smarts

UBS has been renamed "Use to Be Smart" and now we have "We Pretended to be Smart" :

John Thain Admits He Didn't Understand Merrill's Risks: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance:

"The bankers and traders dealing in CDOs didn't understand what they were doing, John Thain said in a recent speech.

“To model correctly one tranche of one CDO took about three hours on one of the fastest computers in the United States. There is no chance that pretty much anybody understood what they were doing with these securities. Creating things that you don’t understand is really not a good idea no matter who owns it,” the former Merrill Lynch chief executive said in a speech this month, according to Financial News."

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