Look, if you people want to find someone to blame over this whole AIG mess

[underpants]

This would pretty much be the guy

Joseph Cassano





The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/2

[babylonsister]

1. He's a major dirty perp. nt

[RoyGBiv]

2. Mike Milken ...

Why did I just KNOW his name was going to pop up somewhere.

Dearlord, we never, ever, ever learn a damn thing.

[lonestarnot]

7. And why did I know he looked zactly like that?

:puke:

[BlooInBloo]

3. He's definitely a big one, among many...

Also is his subordinate DeSantis, well-smacked down by the Rude One, and also here:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20988

"Like a lot of people, I read Wednesday's New York Times editorial by former AIG Financial Products employee Jake DeSantis, whose resignation letter basically asks us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit.

DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano's toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn't even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn't, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn't know where that money was coming from?"

[underpants]

5. I am saving that up for my Sunday morning reads

Taibbi is the best

[BlooInBloo]

6. It's approximately as good as the Rude One - just in a different way.

[underpants]

9. Preaching to the choir my friend

I am catching up on my Rude reading tomorrow too

[BlooInBloo]

10. I predict that tomorrow will be a good day for you.

:)

[Tangerine LaBamba]

4. You found a picture of him!!!

Talk about a dude who's laying low, in his London mansion.

Matt Taibbi - one of my heroes - did a great and thorough job of outing him. Now, I wonder, how long before he's forced into the spotlight?

Oh, how I wish .................

[underpants]

8. Another one-there are several on the google

[sam sarrha]

11. will he go to a real prison for a long long time...?

[mykpart]

12. And here all this time I thought

it was Bill Clinton's fault!