Perhaps I hyperbolize, but it’s still interesting to note—as esteemed business editor Bill Saporito just did to me and Justin—that B of A issued the first private mortgage-backed security. Bill was reading a paper about the resiliency of mortgage-backed securities when collateralized-debt-obligation markets are disrupted (timely!) …

Silly me, I thought it was a good thing that Hank Paulson insisted on more or less wiping out the shareholders of Fannie and Freddie. But now the estimable Anatole Kaletsky of The Times makes the counterargument:

By deciding essentially to wipe out shareholders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and acting even more harshly to the

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That Q&A I mentioned yesterday is now on Time.com. I talk about what happens to your insurance policy at AIG if the company declares bankruptcy, what happens if your mortgage lender goes belly up, and other good stuff.

Barbara!

Australian money manager John Hempton offers the clearest explanation of AIG’s predicament that I’ve seen:

The core business – the US Domestic Broker Group (DBG) is the best diversified primary insurance company in the US. … There are other OK businesses in there.

The good businesses generate about 20 billion per year pre-tax. That

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The WSJ, on the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s decision on severance packages of Fannie Mae’s Daniel Mudd and Freddie Richard Syron:

Mr. Mudd’s pension and 401k plan has an estimated current value of $5.6 million, the official said, and for Mr. Syron the figure is $4 million. But the FHFA won’t allow additional severance payments of

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It all began with the ratings agencies giving their AAA imprimatur to collateralized debt obligations built atop vast mounds of suspect mortgages. And now the crisis is deepening with S&P and Moody’s yanking away ratings at the most inopportune times, as they both did Monday night to insurer AIG.

My first temptation is to yell, as has …

This evening I was talking to someone from Lehman’s research department and I asked about his day at work.

He was surprisingly calm, asking what good it would do to get upset. He said he got an email yesterday to come to work today. So he rode his bike in from Brooklyn—as he’s gotten into the habit of doing—but when he went to the …

Nouriel Roubini has gotten a lot of attention over the past few days for his prediction that no independent broker-dealers (a.k.a. investment banks) will survive the current financial crisis. The only two big ones left are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and their stocks both sank much more than the overall market Monday.

But there …

You can find lots of people arguing now that CEO Dick Fuld‘s hubris led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It may well have been a factor, but the flip side is that Dick Fuld’s hubris was instrumental in resurrecting Lehman in 1994 from its long dormancy as a subsidiary of American Express. As Roddy Boyd and Allan Sloan put it in the …

The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas just sent around some numbers that put the thousands of jobs being lost at Lehman into context.

Annual Financial Sector Job Cuts in the

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