Liars Poker Analysis

How is the game of liar’s poker played? The liar’s poker can be played in-group of as small as two or as many as ten, seated in a circle. And the game is played with eight digit serial numbers on a US dollar bill. Each player has to hold dollar bill close to their chest and unseen by other players. The goal of the game is to guess how often a specific digit appears among all the bills held by players in a circle. For example, if the first bidder says three 5s, then there is at least three 5s among the player’s entire bill including his own. The next player can bid higher number like three 6s, any numbers of at higher level like four 5s, or the player can decide to challenge (I doubt it). The game proceeds on clockwise around the table until all the other players decide to challenge one single player’s bid.

Pay options were also available allowing the borrowers to choose lower payments and the balance of what you should pay and what you actually paid was added to the loan to have a negative amortization. The introductory low rates were called Teaser Rates. The goal was to make home ownership more affordable for more people. Michael Francis and other brokers in Wall Street knew that some of these loans are bad loans but they didn’t cared because they transferred all these loans to whoever wanted to buy them such as pension funds. They are just the intermediary or the pipeline. These pension funds could only buy AAA mortgage loan. The investors wanted to sell their loans to the pension funds but they needed to be rated AAA by these agencies. Their job was to evaluate the risk of the securities. What was the ethical issue here with the agencies? The riskier BBB looked as good as the triple AAA and they looked much safer than they used to be and they started to look more like a AAA security. So AAA requirement got lower as the market got smart. Moodies, S&P, and Fitch are the three rating agencies. They didn’t give price but based on their ratings they got priced. The suggestion is that these agencies would come with the investment bankers. The business was getting more competitive so you just wanted to get more business or more business than the other agencies. When Anne Arundel was asked if standards lower she

Then, in the 1990s, bonds were created consisting of subprime mortgages, which were higher risk mortgages with high interest rates, made to borrowers with lower credit levels. Essentially, banks were handing out mortgages like candy to consumers who were never going to be able to make the payments, but Wall Street kept buying and packaging the mortgages into bonds. Since these bonds were inherently riskier, one wonders why investors were still willing to buy. Investors, who look at ratings by agencies such as Moodys and Standard & Poors, had no reason to believe these bonds were risky investments. The agencies, whom were being paid by Wall Street, were assigning high ratings to these risky bonds.

So what exactly happened to the subprime mortgage market that caused all of this? It actually goes back to 1998 with the Glass-Steagall legislation, which separated regular banks and investment banks was repealed in 1998. This allowed banks, whose deposits were guaranteed by the FDIC to engage in highly risky business because they were guaranteed their deposits up to $250,000 per depositor. Following the dot-com bust in 2000, the Federal Reserve dropped rates to 1 percent and kept them there for an extended period. This drop in rates caused bank managers to have to go after higher-yielding bonds because they could no longer make decent yields off of municipal bonds or treasury bonds. They, like Wall Street, got creative with lending, and went after high-yield mortgage-backed securities like subprime mortgages which were mostly dominated by non-bank originators but because of the demand, many banks and private sector lenders jumped on board to increase profits.

Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis, is a book that thoroughly looks into the author’s life as a broker on Wall Street working for Salomon Brothers, the most profitable firm in the 1980’s. Michael Lewis graduated from The London School of Economics and decided to take his career into trading when offered a job by the top- trading firm. At this time, the mortgage market started booming, and money was flowing all over Wall Street.

When the English people came to America they saw some of the Indians about a mile

During the times leading up to the power struggle, the power dynamic within Lehman was steadily shifting as trading profits became increasingly more important to Lehman versus traditional investment banking profits. Thus, Glucksman was able to step into the spot light and Peterson became more expendable. Peter Peterson’s core

This book brought out the failures of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in America’s history, as orchestrated by Bernie Madoff. Harry Markopolos caught up with Madoff’s Ponzi scheme earlier on in his career and saw all the red flags. There was no explanation of the continuous one percent yield in over forty five stocks that Madoff dealt with. Madoff took advantage of the laxity by the SEC officials in failing to follow up complains with an investigation, and the trust

Michael Lewis, The Big Short, film strategically provided three separate but parallel stories of the U.S mortgage housing of 2008. The movie demonstrated how Wall Street, in a desperate search for profits, lunched “bonds” products with riskier mortgages. As a result, lenders were no longer interested in if a borrower could pay them back. In disbelieved, I noticed deceitful tactics that lenders used, throughout the movie, to convince Americans to take out mortgages they could not afford. Chronologically, Americans’ saving levels dropped while countries ' savings tripled. Once the Recession was in full effect, the US government rescued Wall Street, passing an unimaginably large bill, the bill we are still paying off. To most Americans’ surprise, nearly all of the rescue money went into Wall Street executives’ pockets.

Where do you begin with covering one of the greatest economic crash of our time, and the worst recession since the Great Depression? Michael Lewis takes us to the very beginning, covering the story of how cynical mortgage brokers and CDO managers were playing fraudulent roulette. A rigged system that was doomed from the beginning but that very well needed every piece to be in place for 2008 to happen. Credit rating agencies S&P and Moody’s had to be completely oblivious in properly rating the CDO tranche system, mortgage lenders had to be eager to write down sub-prime loans, and . Yet, through all the dust came a story of the underdogs; Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, Greg Lippmann & his Chinese side kick Eugene Xu, and Cornhole Capital

In the early-2000s, Moody’s, one of the leading credit rating agencies in the world, evaluated thousands of bonds backed by so-called “subprime” residential mortgages—home loans made to those with both low incomes and poor credit scores. When housing prices began to fall in 2006, the value of these bonds disintegrated, and Moody’s was compelled to downgrade them significantly. In late 2008, several commercial banks, investment banks, and mortgage lenders that had been

Quickly these corporations became known as the Fallen Angels and they were looking to rebound in any way possible. Operating managers at the time believed the corporations would rebound fairly easily because corporations would have no choice but to put all their attention on controlling their debt. However, in a situation such as this, close precision and execution is required otherwise the smallest mistake can lead to failure. According to Warren Buffet, “a plan that requires dodging them all is a plan for disaster.” The accumulation of debt continued to rise and not even the healthiest of corporations could obtain the capital to finance it. Even though businesses continued to suffer from accumulating debt, Investment Bankers noted that researchers found over time “higher interest rates received from low grade bonds had more than compensated for their higher rate of default.” From this information, Investment Bankers saw this accumulation of debt as an opportunity for investors. They concluded it was beneficial to have a diversified portfolio of junk bonds because the returns would be higher than a portfolio of high grade bonds. However Warren Buffet disagrees and discovered a hole in this fundamental approach by the Investment Bankers.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

The book starts by talking about the “bond” and how it is used to make interested payments on borrowed money and then gets paid back in the long-term. In the late 1980’s Wall Street had released that is could create products like credit cared, and home mortgages which were very similar in comparison to bonds themselves. The introduction of mortgage bonds allowed the beginning of home mortgages that is a huge part of the financial crisis of 2008. Within the 1990’s mortgage bonds were created that were a much higher risk; these mortgages are called “subprime.” Due to this addition to the market the risks people were taking on became something that they would not realize. Their actions would soon create the housing bubble that occurred and created this financial crisis years and years later.

One of the topics I found most interesting in this book was the differences between the stock market and the bond market that Michael Lewis to some extent explains in the beginning of chapter three. While the stock market was intensely regulated and mostly transparent, the bond market consisted of primarily large institutions and escaped serious regulation. This lack of legislative control played a great part in allowing the credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds, CDO’s, and the eventual collapse of the subprime market. Following the subprime mortgage crisis, the Department of the Treasury released a new regulatory plan, The Department of the Treasury Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory