the payoff - jeff connaughton

[...]... pulled all the referees off the football field Then, the executives trusted to act in the best interests of shareholders had convinced themselves, against all reason and instinct, that they could engineer risk out of the system Despite the fancy equations from the quants, the executives knew (or should’ve known) that they were gambling with shareholders’ money Once executives and companies realized the problem,... when they tried to put a new driveway in, they didn’t know where the roots went The roots went all over I think that’s how Bernanke and Geithner felt.” On March 9, a few days after that meeting, the stock market reached its post-crisis low, with the Dow at 6,547 On April 27, the FERA bill sailed through the Senate (ninety-two to four) The House then passed a similar bill Congress, on both sides of the. .. ever ran for president, I’d be there Well, here I am.” But by then I’d gotten to know many of the other young staffers, all of whom had their own Biden story that had brought them there I had no reason to feel special So, like the others, I went right back to work Eventually, I earned the spurs to take on my own fundraising territory for Biden: Texas and a couple of other southern states My first stop... securitized; that the rating agencies blew it and gave these pools AAA ratings; and that banks were leveraging thirty- and fifty-to-one and buying up these soon-to-be-toxic assets Credit default swaps were being written and traded to hedge these risks without any understanding of who was writing how much and without any regulation or oversight As Ted liked to say, Washington’s decades-long infatuation... million extra, they said, and that’s it Maybe they’d be able to find more in the next budgetary cycle, they said, but, for this year, $30 million would have to do Ted and I talked about whether we should go public, whether he should blow the whistle on Senator Mikulski and the appropriators for short-changing the needed law enforcement effort We considered offering a floor amendment to the appropriations... in as sub-captains (and the more they raised), the more access a captain would get to Biden I was in charge of keeping track of the captains and sub-captains, what they each raised, what levels they reached in the access-to-Biden hierarchy, and what rewards—from a lapel pin to dinner with Biden—they received The Bible worked After Gary Hart dropped out of the race, Biden, from tiny Delaware, was second... where he wanted to pause and breathe It helped him not to rush his delivery and to give the statement a more natural-sounding rhythm Ted did the same thing, striking with his pen a bit nervously as he worked his way through the pages When we arrived at the hearing, Leahy and Grassley were the only senators there Ted’s place along the curved committee dais was at the end of the Democratic quartermoon, and... handed him the briefing materials and returned to the back of the plane Access denied Then things got worse The plane couldn’t leave, first because the flight catering was late and then because of a mechanical issue An hour elapsed, and we were still at the gate I was frantic Fifty people who had written $1,000 checks would be sitting waiting I called the hosts in Houston to tell them about the delay,... refined” their ability to understand complex financial fraud in the Enron case The FBI would build on this cadre by hiring and training new agents But Enron was one company The potentially fraudulent mortgages that Wall Street had bundled and resold as securities had pervaded the banking and insurance industry in the U.S and abroad The FBI’s then-dedicated resources looked inadequate for the mountain... that if they rob a bank, they’ll go to jail Bankers should know that if they rob people, they’ll go to jail, too.” He wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which the newspaper headlined “Punish All Who Caused Crash” and ran next to a cartoon of a fat banker behind bars He went to the Senate floor and thundered that this is a test of whether we have two justice systems in this country The New . Aronica-Buck Cover design by Carly Schnur Paperback ISBN: 97 8-1 -9 3521 2-9 6-6 E-book ISBN: 97 8-1 -9 3521 2-9 7-3 First hardcover printing: September 2012 First ebook publication: August 2012 Printed in the. of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which he and the Republicans had drafted to gut the class- action securities-fraud laws. It was the only Clinton veto given the back-of -the- hand by. computer-driven trading. Too-big-to-fail banks continue to act lawlessly, teeter on the brink, and destabilize the global economy. The post-crisis regulatory reforms (particularly, the Dodd-Frank Act) were