更新时间:2017-02-26
蓝蓝路 • PBS前线：金钱，权力，华尔街:1，2集笔记 (摘抄纪录片原文)
Money, Power and Wall Street 1，2集笔记 (摘抄纪录片原文)
1. The recession
-destroyed $11 trillion of Americans' net worth.
-lost 8.5 million jobs
2. Occupy Wall Street
-We are 99%
-The economy hasn't recovered but banks have.
3. Hearings
(1) Lloyd Craig Blankfein (CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs)
- We regret that people have lost money. And whatever we did, whatever the standards of the time were, it didn't work out well.
- A CDO is a pool of assets, that are pooled together and then can be sliced. In a synthetic you pool reference securities that are indexed to specific more...pools of mortgages.
(2) John Mack (former CEO & Chairman of the Board atMorgan Stanley): I think it's, in many ways it is very simple. I think our regulators and the industry have to focus on complexity.
(3) James Dimon (chairman, president and chief executive officer ofJPMorgan Chase): Somehow we just missed that home prices don't go up forever.
(4) What goes on at Wall Street and exactly what caused the crisis and how did we get where we are, it's difficult to understand even for professionals.
(5) Who was the brilliant person who came and said, "Let's do credit default swaps"? Find him. Fire him.
4. Credit default swaps
(1) Make loans less risky: enable financial institutions to pass risk between them
-One way to do that was to sell loans
-Another way was to separate out the risk of a loan going bad from the loan itself
-Out of that came this drive to develop credit default swaps
(2) A kind of derivative that insures a loan against default
(3) Traditionally derivatives were away to bet on the future value. It is this type of derivative that has been traded on the commodities exchange in Chicago,
along with the futures of fuels, currencies and precious metals.
(4) J.P. Morgan team realized that they could use credit derivatives to trade their loan risks.
(5) Credit derivatives made it possible for a bank to skirt capital requirements.
So banks became able to create more and more credit. They could make more loans.
(6) The innovative element of swaps is that they allow companies, financial institutions, governments, to shed the risks that they don't want to take and take on other risks that they would prefer to be exposed to.
5. Synthetic CDOs
-A market where people were able to buy and sell freely the risk associated with lending to those companies. And so they began selling derivatives that were simply bets on any and all portfolios.
-These products came to be known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations
-In synthetic CDOs, all you had to do was make a side bet based on what would happen to this group of mortgages and have that be the basis of the CDO.
Derivatives markets
-The head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born: “We are the regulator which has been given the authority to oversee the major derivatives markets. If you don't have transparency and regulation of derivatives, the risk is gonna build up
and they're gonna lead to a financial crisis that's gonna cause massive taxpayer bailouts.”
-The banks lobbied hard for no derivative regulation.
-Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States): “Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.”
-Alan Greenspan was coming from a very libertarian tradition. Keep your hands off everything. The markets will sort themselves out. And if there's a problem, then we'll clean up afterwards. And now that really was the way the Federal Reserve operated under his leadership for almost 20 years.
6. Lending abuses (predatory lending)
-We saw borrowers given loans that were greater than the value of their home.
-Home buyers were getting loans that had no income
-When you have a high interest rate, then you have high points, then you have
pre-payment penalties. When you have balloon payments, when you have adjustable-rate mortgages and when you layer those bad practices on top of a high interest rate, it becomes predatory.
7. Subprime CDOs
-The big banks continued to package and sell more mortgage portfolios. And more and more of these CDOs contained high-risk subprime debt.
-When housing prices started to drop, only a very few bankers could see the bubble they were trapped in.
-One of the Wall Street banks that took advantage of a declining market was Goldman Sachs. According to a Congressional investigation, the bank created a series of CDOs containing toxic subprime and then sold them to customers...
-There was a broad misperception of the risk in housing prices. The widespread view that we could have a regional decline in housing prices but never a national decline in housing
prices proved to be horribly wrong.
-AIG could not conceivably have paid off all of those credit derivatives, because it had misunderstood the risks and did not have what we'd call a balanced book or nearly enough capital to back their losses.
-Nobody understood how subprime mortgages had proliferated through these things
called credit default swaps. And nobody understood how they'd kind of gotten into the blood of the financial system.
8. 2008
-The economy is melting, the Bush administration is leaving... And all eyes are now on Barack Obama to turn it around. Obama gets a real glimpse of the future. Disaster is coming.
-Tim Geithner is at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It's the epicenter of the financial system. He is supposed to be the Fed's frontline general, field marshal in the financial markets.
-Geithner concluded, was "too big to fail." A bankruptcy could undermine confidence in every major Wall Street firm. They were all very afraid of the possibility of a bank failure. They didn't know what it would lead to.
-A year later, Phil Angelides would chair the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In their report, the commission concluded regulators at the Federal Reserve, the SEC and other agencies ignored evidence that Wall Street was flirting with disaster.
9. Too big too fail
-Hank Paulson (CEO of Goldman Sachs), Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Federal Reserve), Tim Geithner: They would use $30 billion of government money to avoid a bankruptcy.
-What the New York Fed did was take all the bad stuff off the books of Bear Stearns and allow J.P. Morgan to purchase the good part of it.
-It was an approach Geithner took with Bear Stearns – spending lots of money to respond to a financial crisis. But Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson thought Geithner's strategy might send a dangerous message. He started publicly reminding Wall Street of one of the most basic tenets of the free market: moral hazard.
-Moral hazard poses the question: if you bail somebody out of a problem they themselves cause, what incentive will they have the next time to avoid making the same mistake?
10. Lehman Brothers
- The crisis started because Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. Lehman collapses and there are shockwaves through the world financial system, all around the world.
- No bank wants to lend to any other bank, because they're afraid that the other bank won't be able to pay them back.
-The decision not to bail out Lehman was at the heart of the expanding crisis.
-The policy makers have sent inconsistent signals. They saved Bear. They didn't save Lehman. So the marketplace doesn't know what to expect. And there is no doubt that in the wake of Lehman, there's real panic in the marketplace.
- The only way to look at it was that they were making emergency decisions without a model, without a process, weekend to weekend.
11. AIG
-So much for moral hazard, because you can't let AIG fail.
-Geithner's bailout put the government on the hook for more than $180 billion. Goldman Sachs and the other banks would each receive billions.
- Geithner had orchestrated the AIG rescue in only a few days, but it did not stop the meltdown.
12. Political campaign
- John McCain gives some speech saying he's suspending his campaign and he's coming to Washington and he's calling a summit meeting, and he was going to solve all these problems for us.
-Senator Obama has been talking to Paulson, has been talking to Warren Buffett and Paul Volker and Larry Summers and a host of other economic advisors.
- Obama took charge, had authority. John McCain had no plan, no strategy.
- Bush stands up and says, "Well, I've clearly lost control of this meeting,”and he walks out.
13. Troubled Asset Relief Program
-TARP, like the AIG bailout, is just a manifestation of the mad scramble that has to take place to try to contain the damage from years of neglect in Washington and recklessness on Wall Street.
- Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, the apostle of the free market and believer in moral hazard, would now initiate the largest government intervention in Wall Street since the Great Depression. He was put in the position of doing the last thing he wanted to do, which was to step in directly with government capital into the banking system.
14. That's the real story
The real story of this financial crisis is probably not so much whether the bailout was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. The real question is, how did it come to be that this nation found itself with two stark, painful choices, one of which was to wade in and commit trillions of dollars to save the financial system, where we still end up losing millions of jobs, millions of people lose their homes, trillions of dollars of wealth is wiped away, and the other choice is to face the risk of total collapse?
1. The recession
-destroyed $11 trillion of Americans' net worth.
-lost 8.5 million jobs
2. Occupy Wall Street
-We are 99%
-The economy hasn't recovered but banks have.
3. Hearings
(1) Lloyd Craig Blankfein (CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs)
- We regret that people have lost money. And whatever we did, whatever the standards of the time were, it didn't work out well.
- A CDO is a pool of assets, that are pooled together and then can be sliced. In a synthetic you pool reference securities that are indexed to specific more...pools of mortgages.
(2) John Mack (former CEO & Chairman of the Board atMorgan Stanley): I think it's, in many ways it is very simple. I think our regulators and the industry have to focus on complexity.
(3) James Dimon (chairman, president and chief executive officer ofJPMorgan Chase): Somehow we just missed that home prices don't go up forever.
(4) What goes on at Wall Street and exactly what caused the crisis and how did we get where we are, it's difficult to understand even for professionals.
(5) Who was the brilliant person who came and said, "Let's do credit default swaps"? Find him. Fire him.
4. Credit default swaps
(1) Make loans less risky: enable financial institutions to pass risk between them
-One way to do that was to sell loans
-Another way was to separate out the risk of a loan going bad from the loan itself
-Out of that came this drive to develop credit default swaps
(2) A kind of derivative that insures a loan against default
(3) Traditionally derivatives were away to bet on the future value. It is this type of derivative that has been traded on the commodities exchange in Chicago,
along with the futures of fuels, currencies and precious metals.
(4) J.P. Morgan team realized that they could use credit derivatives to trade their loan risks.
(5) Credit derivatives made it possible for a bank to skirt capital requirements.
So banks became able to create more and more credit. They could make more loans.
(6) The innovative element of swaps is that they allow companies, financial institutions, governments, to shed the risks that they don't want to take and take on other risks that they would prefer to be exposed to.
5. Synthetic CDOs
-A market where people were able to buy and sell freely the risk associated with lending to those companies. And so they began selling derivatives that were simply bets on any and all portfolios.
-These products came to be known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations
-In synthetic CDOs, all you had to do was make a side bet based on what would happen to this group of mortgages and have that be the basis of the CDO.
Derivatives markets
-The head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born: “We are the regulator which has been given the authority to oversee the major derivatives markets. If you don't have transparency and regulation of derivatives, the risk is gonna build up
and they're gonna lead to a financial crisis that's gonna cause massive taxpayer bailouts.”
-The banks lobbied hard for no derivative regulation.
-Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States): “Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.”
-Alan Greenspan was coming from a very libertarian tradition. Keep your hands off everything. The markets will sort themselves out. And if there's a problem, then we'll clean up afterwards. And now that really was the way the Federal Reserve operated under his leadership for almost 20 years.
6. Lending abuses (predatory lending)
-We saw borrowers given loans that were greater than the value of their home.
-Home buyers were getting loans that had no income
-When you have a high interest rate, then you have high points, then you have
pre-payment penalties. When you have balloon payments, when you have adjustable-rate mortgages and when you layer those bad practices on top of a high interest rate, it becomes predatory.
7. Subprime CDOs
-The big banks continued to package and sell more mortgage portfolios. And more and more of these CDOs contained high-risk subprime debt.
-When housing prices started to drop, only a very few bankers could see the bubble they were trapped in.
-One of the Wall Street banks that took advantage of a declining market was Goldman Sachs. According to a Congressional investigation, the bank created a series of CDOs containing toxic subprime and then sold them to customers...
-There was a broad misperception of the risk in housing prices. The widespread view that we could have a regional decline in housing prices but never a national decline in housing
prices proved to be horribly wrong.
-AIG could not conceivably have paid off all of those credit derivatives, because it had misunderstood the risks and did not have what we'd call a balanced book or nearly enough capital to back their losses.
-Nobody understood how subprime mortgages had proliferated through these things
called credit default swaps. And nobody understood how they'd kind of gotten into the blood of the financial system.
8. 2008
-The economy is melting, the Bush administration is leaving... And all eyes are now on Barack Obama to turn it around. Obama gets a real glimpse of the future. Disaster is coming.
-Tim Geithner is at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It's the epicenter of the financial system. He is supposed to be the Fed's frontline general, field marshal in the financial markets.
-Geithner concluded, was "too big to fail." A bankruptcy could undermine confidence in every major Wall Street firm. They were all very afraid of the possibility of a bank failure. They didn't know what it would lead to.
-A year later, Phil Angelides would chair the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In their report, the commission concluded regulators at the Federal Reserve, the SEC and other agencies ignored evidence that Wall Street was flirting with disaster.
9. Too big too fail
-Hank Paulson (CEO of Goldman Sachs), Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Federal Reserve), Tim Geithner: They would use $30 billion of government money to avoid a bankruptcy.
-What the New York Fed did was take all the bad stuff off the books of Bear Stearns and allow J.P. Morgan to purchase the good part of it.
-It was an approach Geithner took with Bear Stearns – spending lots of money to respond to a financial crisis. But Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson thought Geithner's strategy might send a dangerous message. He started publicly reminding Wall Street of one of the most basic tenets of the free market: moral hazard.
-Moral hazard poses the question: if you bail somebody out of a problem they themselves cause, what incentive will they have the next time to avoid making the same mistake?
10. Lehman Brothers
- The crisis started because Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy. Lehman collapses and there are shockwaves through the world financial system, all around the world.
- No bank wants to lend to any other bank, because they're afraid that the other bank won't be able to pay them back.
-The decision not to bail out Lehman was at the heart of the expanding crisis.
-The policy makers have sent inconsistent signals. They saved Bear. They didn't save Lehman. So the marketplace doesn't know what to expect. And there is no doubt that in the wake of Lehman, there's real panic in the marketplace.
- The only way to look at it was that they were making emergency decisions without a model, without a process, weekend to weekend.
11. AIG
-So much for moral hazard, because you can't let AIG fail.
-Geithner's bailout put the government on the hook for more than $180 billion. Goldman Sachs and the other banks would each receive billions.
- Geithner had orchestrated the AIG rescue in only a few days, but it did not stop the meltdown.
12. Political campaign
- John McCain gives some speech saying he's suspending his campaign and he's coming to Washington and he's calling a summit meeting, and he was going to solve all these problems for us.
-Senator Obama has been talking to Paulson, has been talking to Warren Buffett and Paul Volker and Larry Summers and a host of other economic advisors.
- Obama took charge, had authority. John McCain had no plan, no strategy.
- Bush stands up and says, "Well, I've clearly lost control of this meeting,”and he walks out.
13. Troubled Asset Relief Program
-TARP, like the AIG bailout, is just a manifestation of the mad scramble that has to take place to try to contain the damage from years of neglect in Washington and recklessness on Wall Street.
- Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, the apostle of the free market and believer in moral hazard, would now initiate the largest government intervention in Wall Street since the Great Depression. He was put in the position of doing the last thing he wanted to do, which was to step in directly with government capital into the banking system.
14. That's the real story
The real story of this financial crisis is probably not so much whether the bailout was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. The real question is, how did it come to be that this nation found itself with two stark, painful choices, one of which was to wade in and commit trillions of dollars to save the financial system, where we still end up losing millions of jobs, millions of people lose their homes, trillions of dollars of wealth is wiped away, and the other choice is to face the risk of total collapse?
