Re: Obamas Now In With The NYT BS Article
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From the mouth of Bill Clinton
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Date: September 08, 2018 07:06PM
They [Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and Larry Summers] argued that nobody’s going to buy these derivatives, we’ll do it without transparency, they’ll get the information they need. And it turned out to be just wrong; it just wasn’t true. And once you got that massive amount of money invested in derivatives that people thought — it’s like these credit default swaps, where people thought, the Lehman people talk about it, they thought, or the A.I.G. people, they thought it was 100 percent safe investment, they thought there would never be defaults on these mortgage securities. So of course you wanted insurance there because you got the insurance premium, you make the profit and you couldn’t possibly lose money, right? Well, it turned out to be all wrong. That rested on a lot of assumptions, including the fact that the ratings agencies would do a good job, which didn’t happen, in evaluating risk. So I very much wish now that I had demanded that we put derivatives under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and that transparency rules had been observed and that we had done that. That I think is a legitimate criticism of what we didn’t do.