Most of the articles I’ve read or the movies or videos I’ve seen, mainly focus on the events and causes that let to the meltdown of Wall Street on September of 2008. This is well and good to understand what really happened and all the underlying forces which led to crisis. However, little is known about the people behind the scenes who were responsible of pulling the strings which propelled the meltdown.
Most pundits agree that Richard “Dick” Fuld—CEO of Lehman Brothers—became a symbol of failure, the face of arrogant, blundered, massively over leveraged Wall Street. But he was not alone in the gallery of Wall Street’s meltdown. These are the other faces behind the chaos who are rarely mentioned by the media and almost unknown by the average American citizen.
- Henry Paulson, former Treasury Secretary.
- John Cassano, founder member of AIG’s financial products unit.
- Ian McCarthy, CEO of Beazar Homes since 1994.
- Frank Raines, CEO of Fannie Mae.
- Kathleen Corbet, CEO of Standard & Poor’s
- Richard “Dick” Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers.
- Marion and Herb Sandler, owners of Sandler’s World Savings Bank.
- Bill Clinton, former President of the United States.
- George W. Bush, former President of the United States.
- Stan O’Neal, former CEO of Merrill Lynch
- Wen Jiabao, proxy for the government of China.
- David Lereah, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors.
- John Devaney, CEO of United Capital Markets Holdings Inc.
- Bernie Madoff, the alledged creator of the Ponzi Scheme.
- Lew Rainieri, father of the unfortunate mortgage-backed bonds.
- Burton Jablin, the programming czar at Scripps Networks, which owns HGTV and other lifestyle channels.
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Sir Frederick Anderson Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group.
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Sanford I. “Sandy” Weill, former CEO of Citigroup Inc..
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David Oddsson, former Prime Minister of Iceland.
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Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns.
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Angelo Mozilo, cofounder of Countrywide Financial Corp.
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Phil Gramm, former Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000.
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Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chairman.
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Charles Christopher “Chris” Cox, former Chief of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).
This list is by no means an exhaustive one. It merely includes the main players of the wild roller coaster ride of Wall Street which ended on the brink of a global financial collapse.
The arrogance of these players was obnoxious. In early 2007, talking about option ARM mortgages, John Devaney told Money Magazine, “The consumer has to be an idiot to take on one of those loans, but it has been one of our best-performing investments.”
Employees at Goldman Sachs called the products they were promoting as crap, lemons and shitty deals. During a recent Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations presided by Senator Cal Levin, he read a memo written by a Goldman Sachs’ employee which said, “…they structured like mad, traveled the world and worked their tails off to make some lemonade from some big old lemons.” Another memo said, “Boy that Timber Wolf was one shitty deal.”
Need I say more? Good Day.
Source: 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis – Time Magazine Online
