Word: firmness
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Americans are not happy about the huge taxpayer assistance to Wall Street and feel pessimistic about their own economic situation. That's the finding of a new TIME poll (conducted by research firm Abt SRBI) done in late October...
...different story at intelligently run companies like Goldman. They make money by understanding risk and managing it. If the firm as a whole doesn't make money, the traders and risk takers don't either...
...divisions at AIG that brought down the firm - financial products and stock-lending - didn't understand what they were doing. Financial products wrote credit-default swaps - sorry I'm not pausing to explain them, but most eyes would glaze over if I did - that they thought were riskless but turned out to be ultra-risky...
...invested the money in esoteric securities rather than in risk-free Treasuries, the standard practice. The idea was - I'm not kidding - to make an extra one-fifth of 1% in interest. When the esoterica, which the stock-loan folks thought was riskless, crumbled, so did the firm. (See the worst business deals...
...forget, too, that a fair number of Wall Streeters got wiped out because their wealth was tied to their firm's stock price. Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman, had shares and options worth about $1 billion at their peak. He got less than $1 million when he sold them after the firm went bankrupt. (He still took home, before taxes, $490 million from his stock-based compensation, so don't cry for him.) James Cayne, CEO of the defunct Bear Stearns, was in a similar situation. If Fuld and Cayne had known their firms were as badly...