LyrArc Article Gist
Reviews of "End of Wall Street" by Roger Lowenstein and the "Big Short" by Michael Lewis show not only how the traders like Michael Burry and Steve Eisman built up credit default swap positions and bet that the housing market with subprime lending would collapse. The Big Short says Gross is a portrait of misfits, which is how the traders are shown in their personal lives. For Eisman a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Harvard Law School, his own wife is quoted as saying, that even on Wall Street he was seen as "rude, obnoxious and aggressive." About lives of the men of finance, Lowenstein describes one incident in which Vikram Pandit is spotted at lunch in "Le Bernardin," a top rated restaurant in New York. Pandit sees nothing by the glass and orders a $350 bottle so he could savor a glass of wine worth drinking. All this for doing what Loyd Blankfein described as "doing God's work."

LyrArc Article Gist
This New York Times editorial asks whose side the Republicans are on when they try to water down needed financial reforms. Are they simply speaking for the banks who stand to lose billions of dollars in profits through unregulated derivates trading but increase systemwide financial risk. The NYT supports senator Blance Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat who is chairwoman of the agriculture committee, and who took a strong position in favor of controlling derivatives. Her proposal requires nearly all derivatives be traded on exchanges with exemptions only for unique contracts which would be supervised by regulators, and for a strictly defined group of companies with specific purposes.

LyrArc Article Gist
The issue says the New York Times is whether the financial meltdown was caused by one of these frequent crises of capitalism as bankers would have us believe or was there malfeasance involved. This is its comment on the SEC filing civil charges against Goldman Sachs in the Abacus case in which Goldman helped Paulson put together a batch of bad mortgage securities into a security that it sold to its institutional clients, without disclosing what Paulson had done and without disclosing that Paulson had structured these securities precisely so that he could bet against them. As other financial houses are also involved in dealings of this type, the New York Times editorial says this will mean people at these firms will also not be sleeping well in the coming days and months. This is a story that Gretchen Morgenson and Louis Story of the New York Times wrote about for the first time several months back.