Jesus, *everyone* is twittering/emailing/suggesting this 2800+ word monster op-ed in today’s New York Times by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. Here’s a snip:
Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.
This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?
Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?
To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.
The End of the Financial World As We Know It (NYT). When you’re done with that, don’t miss the companion piece in the same NYT edition, How to Repair a Broken Financial World, which is another must-read, clocking in at 2,000 words. And when you’re done with all that, go watch “Keeping up with the Kardashians” or “Dog The Bounty Hunter” and eat some Hot Pockets, because AFAIAC, you’ll have paid your thinkin’ dues for the week.
About the writers: “Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Liar’s Poker, is writing a book about the collapse of Wall Street. David Einhorn is the president of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund, and the author of Fooling Some of the People All of the Time.“