Ian On The Red Dot

The reason why I don’t trust finance people and actually hate them.

Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.

Showing a photograph of the resort, Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa.

They are modern day robbers. Human greed is such a beautiful thing to see.

The current issue with the DBS High Notes is an interesting one for me because I did consider buying similar products. A few things stopped me from buying though.

1. One of the first things I learned during my NS days is that if you cannot convince someone, confuse them. And reading the prospectus for the products definitely confused me. And when I’m being confused, I don’t trust the other party.

2. Over a dinner with a bunch of acquaintances, a banker was talking to another acquaintance in government service. The government official asked the banker his opinion on structured products. The basic gist of the conversation was that the banker advised the government official not to buy the product and if he really knew what he was doing, he (the government official) could get better returns from his own investing efforts without having to give the bank a cut. He also explained that the products only worked if the markets behaved within a certain range - it was only safe within a range.

Think about this for a moment. A banker advising someone not to buy his own company’s product. Of course, the situation here is slightly differently. The banker assumed the friend could do better as opposed to the banker thinking his bank will just mess things up. Last takeaway - the banker didn’t think it was worth paying the bank anything for the product.

I don’t get this.

You got the finance people who lent money to those who cannot possibly have a reasonable recourse to repay in the future. Fine.

What I don’t get is how people can default on loans and then weasel out of playing the full sum of money they owe while trying to make it look like it is all the finance people’s fault.

I mean, for these people to have the money in the first place, someone had to contribute it. It could be from investors in financial products or people who were saving.

They took the money and lived the good life. Some of the people who invested and saved are wiped out or lost enough to make the next few years of their lives unbearable.

You say we are all in the same boat.

I say, Fuck you.

When I was saving and ‘investing’, you were taking out money and living the good life without any reasonable recourse to pay. Now you weasel out and clam to be my brother/sister in suffering.

I haven’t lived the good life. You have.

It is not that I don’t have sympathy for those who might be suffering from the current crisis. I do. I’ve been there and I know it ain’t pretty. But the sympathy is gained based on how you got to this point. For those who saved and saved but got wiped out because they were using the wrong bank, my heart bleeds together with you.

For those who overextended to live the good life and now want to claim sympathy, Fuck you.

Update: I’m pissed because at the end of the day, a lot of decent and frugal people are getting fucked by a whole bunch of other people who won’t be suffering with us or who lived the good life and now want to be just like us without any consequences to their earlier actions. You do the crime, you got to do the time. In a world where this doesn’t happen, think carefully about whether you want to bring children into this world - a world where values are whacked.

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES