Thursday, May 13, 2010

Andrew Cuomo and the sub-prime mortgages

(AG Andrew Cuomo is investigating eight banks to see if they misled rating agencies to inflate the grades of mortgage securities in the years before the collapse of the housing market.

GOP gubernatorial hopeful Rick Lazio says Cuomo has “the personality of Eliot Spitzer” and “an ambition that’s out of control.”)
**********
The NYT best selling non-fiction books has Michael Lewis’s The Big Short as #1.
It’s a good read, and I’m half way through it.
Lewis personalizes the sub-prime crisis.
He focuses on Wall Street honchos who saw the profit to be made in the sub-prime disaster, through the bundling of these mortgages into bonds,and then buying insurance called credit default swaps. It was a Ponzi scheme writ large.
Lazio will claim that Cuomo,at HUD, pushed the sub-prime homebuying.
But Lazio will ignore what Lewis describes as the reason for sub-primes-the great inequality that was created in the 80s and 90s.
Yes, and Lewis also describes the rating agencies rubber-stamping these mortgage bundles.
Go get them, AG.
**********
The NYT best-seller nonfiction list has Oprah’s bio. at #2. Not tempted to read this. Don’s watch daytime tv.Oprah is a billionaire and good luck to her.
#3 is Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea,Chelsea Bang Bang. Read this, and not impressed with her humor. It’s mostly adolescent put-downs. She is overrated.
#4 is Carol Burnett’s autobio. Good read. Good to see her still being relevant.
Good because almost everyone else is gone.
Surfing cable finds a commercial for the old Dean Martin Celebrity Roast dvds.
It’s totally depressing. Everyone on these DVDs have left their physical bodies and their souls are in a much better place.
Everone of them-Martin,Sinatra,Davis,Jack Benny,Hope,John Wayne,Gleason,Red Buttons,Carson,Michael Landon ad infinitum.

No comments: