Re:Goldman Sachs Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk
by vkou on Friday December 22, 2017 @01:37PM
(#15989758)
An engineer signing off on a bridge design is also 'merely' an opinion. It's an opinion that will put that engineer in jail, if the bridge collapses, and it turns out that he took a bribe to sign off on the design.
There's a world of difference between "We misjudged the long-tail risk of the instrument we rated" and "We straight up lied so that we could keep getting business from the banks."
Half the mortgages in some of those AAA instruments were issued to people with income at minimum wage, or with credit rating in the 500s, or to people buying homes that were never even looked at by underwriters. This isn't a "Whoops, our math was a bit off, we didn't expect the collateral to drop in value for a bit."
This is straight-up fraud, and the people carrying it out should have been taken out back, and had their shirts taken away from them. We need more, not less personal responsibility from our professional sectors.
Re:Goldman Sachs Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk
by cm2187 on Friday December 22, 2017 @04:01PM
(#15990859)
If you think that the future of a business or an economy is as predictable as whether a bridge will hold, my advice to you is to stay away from any financial product.
There's a world of difference between "We misjudged the long-tail risk of the instrument we rated" and "We straight up lied so that we could keep getting business from the banks."
Half the mortgages in some of those AAA instruments were issued to people with income at minimum wage, or with credit rating in the 500s, or to people buying homes that were never even looked at by underwriters. This isn't a "Whoops, our math was a bit off, we didn't expect the collateral to drop in value for a bit."
This is straight-up fraud, and the people carrying it out should have been taken out back, and had their shirts taken away from them. We need more, not less personal responsibility from our professional sectors.