Ape Mind Transcripts

The rash of complaints by homeowners like Feeney shows what was missing during the boom years: strong oversight by the City of Chicago. Until recently, the buildings department depended on developers to call during construction when they were ready for an inspection, sort of an honor system. Those who wanted to avoid scrutiny could just not call. Many of the developers in Janes’s cases, like Mary Feeney’s, never got a certificate of occupancy showing final inspections had been done.

Eight Forty-Eight, a local NPR show, has an excellent report on the shoddy construction and absent standards that marked Chicago’s big condo building boom. I know a number of friends who’ve had to sue developers for new or rehabbed buildings. Often the developers have skipped town or insulated the profits in shell companies, and condo owners end up with a lot of hassle and little recompense.

Definitely makes me glad to be a renter.

“He draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.

Michael Lewis, author of “Liar’s Poker” and “Moneyball,” has a great write-up of the Wall Street collapse in Portfolio.com. “The End” ties the subprime financial collapse to the valueless engineered by financial firms in the 1980s. The article focuses on Steve Eisman,  one of the few financial professionals who saw and bet against the big subprime scam.

But the real core of the piece is the destructive capitalism that has been at the heart of our financial system over the past three decades. Instead of profiting from determinations of value, the firms in the subprime crisis Ponzied their investors by repeatedly shuffling stacks of money. Investors bought into the myth, literally, and when everything crumbled, the government bailed out the big boys, setting them up to develop the next big scam.