A Reporter’s Notepad: My Almost Book On The Blame-Shifters
by ilene - September 11th, 2010 3:35 pm
A Reporter’s Notepad: My Almost Book On The Blame-Shifters
Courtesy of Roddy Boyd, THE FINANCIAL INVESTIGATOR
Editor’s Note: There is perhaps nothing so silly and attention-seeking as the reporter who willingly inserts him- or herself into a story for some narrative purpose or other, but I am going to make a (big) and one-time exception to this rule by posting this.
The backstory: Prior to committing to a book on AIG and its collapse, I had begun to pitch a book called “Shifting The Blame.”
The idea was simplicity itself: I’d take about eight or nine companies–from Overstock to Lehman, from Arthrocare to MBIA–who had hit the skids and who had, at some point, blamed some combination of reporters and short-sellers for their woes. As opposed to, say, embellishing their financials, lying, losing money, hiding losses, incompetence…you take the point. My goal was to fuse investigative reporting and the naturally dramatic arc of their sleazy behavior and comeuppances to make for an eye-opening read. I’d raise a few eyebrows, get some laughs, maybe make a deeper point about free speech, investigative reporting and the real scandals in the market.
My agent, summoning me to a breakfast one Saturday, said she loved the idea but, well, there was another book coming out by a fellow named Rick Sauer and it was going to hit on a few of the same themes. I lamely tried to suggest that Sauer’s book was an “Inside-the-SEC guy-turned-shortseller” type thing, where as my work was a series of inter-connected investigative essays.
No matter. The market is the market and the market didn’t, apparently, want two of these books. So I scrapped it.
This was the preface to the book, telling a story about an earnest PR guy who had the unenviable job of spinning a discredited yarn into gold for his revenge-hungry clients. I found it in a musty corner of the hard-drive and showed it to a few pretty smart former colleagues of mine who said they liked it.
I sort of do too. It’s dated, but like a hiss on an old record album, it gives it some gravity. Maybe.
The origin of this book lies with a series of phone conversations between myself and Jeffrey Lloyd, a partner at the public relations firm of Sitrick and Company, in the early autumn of 2008.
Lloyd, a courteous…
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AIG: Res Ipsa Loquitur
by ilene - September 4th, 2010 9:49 pm
AIG: Res Ipsa Loquitur
Courtesy of Roddy Boyd, The Financial Investigator
Editor’s Note: A graf was added describing the signal contribution of The Wall Street Journal’s Serena Ng and Liam Pleven in explaining the Securities Lending unit in a February 5, 2009 article. Rather than fold it into the graf where I describe how Miles Weiss and Andrew Ross Sorkin advanced the story, I chose to break it out seperately. Accountability and transparency, to say nothing of accuracy, is central to enterprise reporting and when I fall short, I seek to immediately remedy the situation.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s document release last Wednesday doesn’t offer the curious an answer to a question that hasn’t received much play since AIG’s collapse in September 2008.
The question is: “How Did AIG really collapse?”
Not: “How did they get in trouble?” Or: “Who is to Blame?”
But rather, what led to a firm that had a AA- rating, around $160-billion in market cap and $14-billion in profits–with real cash generation capacity to boot– in fiscal 2006 effectively go out of business in September 2008?
The answer is not Goldman Sachs.
It would be exceptionally easy–for no one more so than me since as I am in the process of writing a book on the collapse of AIG called Fatal Risk–if it had though.
The picture painted of Goldman Sachs, especially from legislators in Washington D.C. and the media–nowhere more so than the business desk of the New York Times–centers largely on the now infamous series of swaps that one of Goldman’s proprietary trading desks entered into with AIG as central to its collapse. In this view, Goldman’s meticulous enforcement of so-called credit support agreements and the billions of dollars in collateral calls forced upon AIG’s Financial Products unit is seen as fatal.
Yet months of investigation into the matter suggest a different answer: What killed AIG was much more likely the financial and managerial collapse within AIG Global Investment Corporation’s securities lending program.
The management of the unit, under Win Neuger, took a portfolio that had been throwing off about four basis points of profit since inception in the 1990s and in 2005 began imposing a 30-basis point profit target. Outside of the sheer impossibility of improving margins 7.5 times, the practical hurdles to obtaining creditworthiness and liquidity were formidable. So daunting, in fact, that creditworthiness and liquidity were tossed out and a…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site