On BBC2 this evening (14/1/2009)

PasturesNew

I am reading this thread and am so thick I've now got to click the link to watch it to see if I watched it last night or not.

Damned memory ..... better do it before I forget to watch/check.

Update: Yes, I did watch it ... but now got to watch it again as I've completely forgotten what he said/what it was all about ... I had trouble watching it when it was on, I kept losing focus and forgetting it was on. I do that. Rubbish at watching films, I normally nod off. One hour TV programmes are too long for my attention span really.

WTF?_2

Lotus-eater wrote: »

I liked the program btw. To the point and interesting. Although I knew most of the stuff on it, it put everything into the right order and made me realise even more, that no way on earth is there going to be any more lending for a while.

Yep, it was good for putting everything in context and highlighting the key points which may have got lost in debtate.

* the banking business became more about making loans for the purposes of making money on their securitization than about making sensible loans that would return reliable profits to the bank in the future - so they turned to sub-prime as an untapped source of borrowers. Whether or not they could repay the loans didn't matter as someone else would be buying the risk.

* banks ended up buying each others CDOs when the whole point was to sell them and transfer the risk to someone else outside the banking system.

* even had the banks acted more sensibly, shareholders were demanding higher and higher profits so no-one at the top was going to be the person who changed the bank's business model to a more sustainable strategy, losing profits and market share.

* Very few people understood the various securitized products and relied on ratings agencies to tell them if they were safe to buy or not. The ratings agencies had a potential conflict of interest as the sellers of the product paid to have it rated.


Evan Davis must be pretty annoyed that he moved out of being BBC TVs front man for finance/economics just as the crisis broke and finance became the top current affairs issue.

harryhound

* the banking business became more about making loans for the purposes of making money on their securitization than about making sensible loans that would return reliable profits to the bank in the future - so they turned to sub-prime as an untapped source of borrowers. Whether or not they could repay the loans didn't matter as someone else would be buying the risk.

* banks ended up buying each others CDOs when the whole point was to sell them and transfer the risk to someone else outside the banking system.

It all sounds very like the Lloyds Insurance spiral, where the syndicates laid off their risks against each other and then later discovered they had bought it back again!

At least the names only brought each other to their knees and did not drag down the whole world's economy.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article4255935.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1185799

Snooze

!!!!!!? wrote: »

Yep, it was good for putting everything in context and highlighting the key points which may have got lost in debtate.

* the banking business became more about making loans for the purposes of making money on their securitization than about making sensible loans that would return reliable profits to the bank in the future - so they turned to sub-prime as an untapped source of borrowers. Whether or not they could repay the loans didn't matter as someone else would be buying the risk.

* banks ended up buying each others CDOs when the whole point was to sell them and transfer the risk to someone else outside the banking system.

* even had the banks acted more sensibly, shareholders were demanding higher and higher profits so no-one at the top was going to be the person who changed the bank's business model to a more sustainable strategy, losing profits and market share.

* Very few people understood the various securitized products and relied on ratings agencies to tell them if they were safe to buy or not. The ratings agencies had a potential conflict of interest as the sellers of the product paid to have it rated.


Evan Davis must be pretty annoyed that he moved out of being BBC TVs front man for finance/economics just as the crisis broke and finance became the top current affairs issue.

I also thought it was a good programme - very well explained and I find that guy presents stuff quite well in general, even if he could watch a tennis match without moving his head .

I'll be looking forward to the next 2 parts next week and week after.

Rob

BettiePage

!!!!!!? wrote: »

I have however changed my avatar in honour of Patrick McGoohan RIP.

Thank god for that! I thought I was going mad for a minute there.