re: #44 Franklin

The whole too-big-to-fail doesn’t work as well now as when the bailout happened.

I’ll let Barney Frank explain here:

washingtonpost.com

And Steve Eisman (the real life version as portrayed by Steve Carrel in The Big Short) explain here:

nytimes.com

I saw the movie last week, and now I’m reading the book. Lewis makes it very clear that Eisman and the other traders were dumbstruck that the entire mortgage, banking and investment culture was either stupendously idiotic or crooked, or both. It was a giant Ponzi scheme on steroids, making money out of thin air.

Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s come off as total clowns, too. They deliberately gave those shaky investment vehicles high ratings so they could earn their commissions from the big banks marketing them.