The Complete Guide to Investing in Exchange Traded Funds: How to Earn High Rates of Return - Safely Book

More of an rant than a critical examination of the financial crisis
13 December 2013

As I was making my way through the commentaries that I have already published on Goodreads, fixing up the typos and tightening up some of the grammar, I came upon this commentary that I had written sometime ago and discovered, to my surprise, that it was quite short. The reason that I am somewhat surprised is that I would normally write quite a lot more on the casino culture of Wall Street and its unregulated greed, particularly since it is something that generally boils my blood. Okay, one of the reasons for that is because I am one of the 99% who, while not being the hardest of workers, feels that I have been relegated to some corner of the corporate world on little more than a subsistence salary while other, less deserving people, are racking in their millions at the expense of basically the rest of the world.

Now, the problem with this book is twofold: first of all, while he does claim to get to the crux of the problem that led to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, I felt that this book was written a little too soon after the events and tended to be much more of a rant that generally does not get to the core of the actual problem. In many cases he seems to gloss over a lot of things and was also critical on the use of language that was not at the heart of the problem (such as the difference between a liquidity crisis and a solvency crisis). I feel that there are much better books on the whole issue out there than this book, and I feel that it has simply been written by somebody who has a chip on his shoulder (probably because he lost all of his money, and found himself out of a job, when the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan).

My biggest issue with the Global Financial Crisis is what has been termed as the greatest bank robbery in the history of humanity. Now, when I make comment about it being a bank robbery, I am not talking about something like this:



rather I am talking about somebody like this:



giving somebody like this:



a bucket load of money because his financial institution (the Bank of America) was on the verge of bankruptcy and if it were to go under then there would be untold pain and suffering erupting across the entire world, which basically means that this guy:



no longer gets to live in a house that looks like this:



or is able to use one of these:



to get to work every day.

The main cause of the Global Financial Crisis actually has a number of concerns: one of the major ones was that the previous bubble, known as the Tech Wreck, in which a bucket load of internet companies collapsed because, well, they weren't actually making any money, was solved through record low interest rates, and this guy:



sitting in that exact pose, basically told everybody that the should go out and spend, spend, spend. So, being the good American citizens that they were, they did, and they spent their money on anything and everything. When they didn't have any money left that didn't stop them because then they pulled out their credit cards, and took out loans on their houses, and continued to spend, spend, spend.

The banks, who were foresightful enough to see that there was a problem (namely that if all of these people were borrowing money but were not going to be able to pay it back), and knowing that if all of these woefully indebted people were to all go bankrupt then they would also be in a lot of trouble (because banks have debts as well), decided that they would solve the problem by packaging all of their loans up together, and parcel them out as securities, and their mates in the ratings agencies were kind enough to endorse these securities as being rock solid investments.

However, the people that had lent the banks money were also concerned that maybe they wouldn't get their money back, so they went to the insurance companies and asked them if they could take out insurance against the debts that the banks owed them. When the insurance companies looked at the list of blue chip banks that were indebted to these people, they said 'no problem' and sold them insurance polices against the unlikely event that these banks would not be able to pay back their debt.

Oh, and after selling off all of their debts, and getting their money back, the banks, who actually do not know what to do with money, other than lend it to people, realised that they had a stack of cash with nothing to do with it, so they did what they did best: lent it out again. All the while the banks were packaging up the loans and onselling them to stupid (did I say that? These investments were AAA according to Moody's and Standard and Poors) investors.

However, something unexpected happened (actually it wasn't all that unexpected, but the results of this event were) and that was that the economy was starting to overheat, so the Federal Reserve, in an attempt to cool an overheating economy, began to raise the interest rates. This started causing problems because all of those good people who were able to pay back their debts suddenly discovered that they were having difficulties meeting the interest payments. Now, banks always expect to have some bad debts on their books, and also expect to have a certain number of defaults, however as the interest rates continued to rise, the bad debts continued to grow - exponentially.

This started causing problems because the banks were not actually getting their interest payments (let alone their principles) and they themselves were starting to have problems making ends meet. While the big banks were struggling, the smaller, fringe institutions began to discover that they were up a certain creek without a certain propelling device. Thus the outliying fringe institutions (known to us as sub-prime lenders) began collapsing like a house of cards. Now, these sub-prime lenders would be underwritten by larger banks and the knock on effect meant that some of these larger institutions (first of all Bear Sterns) began to collapse, culminating with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

When Lehman Brothers collapses; well, everybody thought that this was the end, but remember those insurance polices that were written to be paid out in the event that one of these blue chip institutions suddenly went bust - well, they had to be honoured, and all of the sudden the biggest insurance company in the world (AIG) suddenly found that it didn't have enough cash reserves to actually meet the payments, and while they would normally go running to their reinsurers to bail them out, because these were supposed to be safe as houses investments, the reinsurers didn't play ball - thus the world was on the brink of financial armegeddon.

So, we all know what happen - America started printing money like it was nobody's business, and the government dumped well over three trillion dollars into the banks coffers (creating one of the largest government deficits known to humanity) and the senior executives all went off and had a nice holiday in California, while this guy:



took all the blame.