Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Bear Stearns Sold "Sack of Shit" Bonds to Pensioners

Terri Buhl writes in the Atlantic...
E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out of Billions
Can we change this headline to Bear Sterns makes old pensioners slave for sacks of shit?
To say they sold them to instituional investors is a little misleading. These instituitional investors were buying for pension funds. They either knew or should have known these bonds were "shit breathers" but they were likely given big perks to turn the other way.

These pension funds are the product of years of blood sweat and tears by working class people who thought they would have some sort of nest egg for retirement. Instead they have the "sacks of shit" sold to them by Bear Sterns and bought for them by investment funds at Ambac and others.

It has been known since well before 2008 that pension funds were where Bear Sterns and others were dumping these crap bonds and mortgage backed securities. They would wine and dine heads of pension funds at places like Ambac and tell them about this great financial product they had to sell. Of course if the people at Ambac did any research at all they would realize these investments were junk, but hey it wasnt their pension and they collected some nice perks for playing ball.

BTW in Ambac's defense these emails came out due to a lawsuit by Ambac which was just recently unsealed. Although the cynical part of me thinks this was a defensive move on Ambac's part to protect against lawsuits against them from pensioners. Now they can say they did their "due dilligence" even if they didn't do it 3 years ago.

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