#greatfinancialcrisis — Public Fediverse posts

Crooked auditors were at the center of the #GreatFinancialCrisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the #Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant #ArthurAndersen. After Enron, Congress passed #SarbanesOxley (#SOX), which created a new oversight board called the #PublicCompanyAccountingOversightBoard (#PCAOB).

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Crooked auditors were at the center of the #GreatFinancialCrisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the #Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant #ArthurAndersen. After Enron, Congress passed #SarbanesOxley (#SOX), which created a new oversight board called the #PublicCompanyAccountingOversightBoard (#PCAOB).

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Crooked auditors were at the center of the #GreatFinancialCrisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the #Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant #ArthurAndersen. After Enron, Congress passed #SarbanesOxley (#SOX), which created a new oversight board called the #PublicCompanyAccountingOversightBoard (#PCAOB).

15/

Crooked auditors were at the center of the #GreatFinancialCrisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the #Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant #ArthurAndersen. After Enron, Congress passed #SarbanesOxley (#SOX), which created a new oversight board called the #PublicCompanyAccountingOversightBoard (#PCAOB).

15/

Crooked auditors were at the center of the #GreatFinancialCrisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the #Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant #ArthurAndersen. After Enron, Congress passed #SarbanesOxley (#SOX), which created a new oversight board called the #PublicCompanyAccountingOversightBoard (#PCAOB).

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But the crash of 2008 made it clear that the largest insurance companies in the world were capable of the same wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and short-termism that they were supposed to prevent in every other business. Without AIG - one of the largest insurers in the world - there would have been no #GreatFinancialCrisis. The company knowingly underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in junk bonds dressed up as AAA debt, and required a $180b bailout.

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But all that changed in 2008, when the world's central banks addressed the #GreatFinancialCrisis by bailing out not just the *banks*, but the *bankers*, funneling trillions to the people whose reckless behavior brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.

Suddenly, these wealthy people, and their banks, experienced enormous wealth-gains *without* profits.

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Perhaps you recall predatory inclusion from the #GreatFinancialCrisis, when predatory #SubprimeMortgages with deceptive teaser rates were foisted on Black homeowners (who were eligible for better mortgages), resulting in a wave of Black home theft in the #foreclosure crisis:

https://prospect.org/justice/staggering-loss-black-wealth-due-subprime-scandal-continues-unabated/

Before these loans blew up, they were styled as a means of creating Black intergenerational wealth through housing speculation.

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"Really smart" isn't the same as "infallible" and really smart people can be spooked or bulled into doing the wrong thing - like #Obama "foaming the runways" for the banks with the houses of mortgage holders, and leaving the bankers responsible for the #GreatFinancialCrisis unscathed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

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When Geithner told Obama he had to "#FoamTheRunway" for the crashing banks with the roofs over everyday Americans' heads, there were no grassroots organizers foaming at the mouth in outrage. Thus did Obama end the #GreatFinancialCrisis - by creating the Great #ForeclosureCrisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

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Obama's tolerance of bank sleze after the #GreatFinancialCrisis kicked off the modern era of corporations and grifters stealing Americans' out from under them, forging deeds in #robosigning mills:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-breaks-down-93-bln-robo-signing-settlement-2013-02-28

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Expansionary austerity is politics dressed up as economics. Indeed, the political ideology subsumed into our bedrock models has caused governments to fail to anticipate crisis after crisis, including the 2008 #GreatFinancialCrisis.

The politics in modeling are especially obvious in the process running up to the Trump tax cuts.

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That's what makes the bailout so dismaying. It involves an exotic (to put it mildly; "absurd" also springs to mind) interpretation of the FDIC's statutory authority and the contours of the #DoddFrankAct, passed after the #GreatFinancialCrisis to ensure that the public would never reward reckless banks for failure.

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But despite a long-run tight labor market for tech workers, there have been two other periods of mass layoffs - the 2001 #DotcomCollapse and the #GreatFinancialCrisis of 2008.

Both of those were mass extinction events for startups and the workers who depended on them. The mass dislocations of those times were traumatic, and each one had its own aftermath. The dotcom collapse freed up tons of workers, servers, offices and furniture, and a massive surge in useful, humane techn.

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#BarryWish was a board member of #Ocwen, a company he co-founded. After the #GreatFinancialCrisis, Ocwen bid unsuccessfully to buy $215b worth of Bank of America mortgages. The winning bidder was #Nationstar. Three weeks before Nationstar's winning bid was announced, Wish bought $600k worth of Nationstar shares. After the bid was announced, he sold them for for a $157k profit.

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A quick refresher: Obama inherited the #GreatFinancialCrisis, a massive global asset crash that followed from a decade of real-estate and derivatives deregulation that saw the world's largest banks issuing mortgages they knew would fail, and then placing massive bets on "#CollateralizedDebtObligations" that were supposed to offset the risk.

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60% of Boomer-owned businesses - 2.9m firms of ~11 employees each, 32m people in all - are expected to sell in the coming decade.

If nothing changes, these businesses are likely to end up in the hands of consolidators. Since the #GreatFinancialCrisis of 2008, private equity firms and other looters have been awash in free money, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and Congress, who chose to bail out irresponsible and deceptive lenders, not the borrowers they preyed upon.

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