User talk:DavidMSA

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Please post any and all comments for DavidMSA here. Thank you! DavidMSA (talk) 03:56, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Contents 1 I'm done here 2 Glass-Steagal vs. SOX 3 Yo Back 4 March 2008 5 Laughingman78

[edit] I'm done here

I see your point about the criticism, but my job is done. My 'activities' here and elsewhere have attracted the attention of some very influential people in the Marmion community who are looking into complaints by myself and other students.

Take Care,

L.M.

Umm OK but its weirded me out, I'll be honest with you. Hopefully we can all sit down eventually and confirm the Truce. I'm going to focus on editing other things here. Peace. DavidMSA (talk) 04:18, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for wierding you out i probably should have explained myself better. I started changing wikipedia after i found out that Marmion faculty keeps tabs on sites that mentioned Marmion. I figured that if i complained enough on the site that they would eventually see it and listen to the complaining students. well it kind of worked because some students are putting forth official complaints and it looks like we'll be heard. hope this shed some light on the situation.

L.M. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Laughingman78 (talk • contribs) 04:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification, I am interested to follow how everything shakes out. I've got other stuff to focus on. Take care. DavidMSA (talk) 01:38, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Glass-Steagal vs. SOX

Hi David, I will confess I'm not that familiar with Glass-Steagall. You might have to tee-up a specific question about what it required and I'll try to address better. My initial thoughts on a complex question below.

I took a quick peek at the G-S article in here and it seems like a pretty good idea; repealing it was probably a mistake. I often find it ironic that major banks struggling with the crisis are busy downgrading each other. Depository banking and investment banking should be entirely separated, I think. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) did some things to change disclosures regarding investment banking conflicts, a small step in the right direction.

Broadly speaking, conflicts of interest and badly-designed incentives are among the root causes of the crises that we see, whether with the events leading up to SOX or the subprime crisis. Unlike greed and fear, we can legislate fixes for them. A big one we mention but didn't explore in the subprime article is the conflict of interest between rating agencies and the institutions that paid them to rate their MBS. Big problem that probably needs a regulatory fix. The PCAOB created by SOX to regulate the accounting industry is paid for by fees from those firms. Perhaps banks and investment banks could contribute to a general fund (perhaps from those huge bonuses) to pay for the rating agencies, so there is no individual pressure on specific MBS ratings. Despite all the doom & gloom, Bank of America still made $15 billion or so in 2007...not a bad year in my book. They have the cash to pay some independent geeks to do the risk rankings.

I think Sarbanes-Oxley is a net win--a good but costly regulation. Pros: Preventing an accounting firm from doing both consulting & auditing. Anderson had like $50 million in consulting revenue vs. $2 million in audit fees from Enron right before the blow-up; would you expect that auditor to be tough with management? Similarly, enhancing board audit committees (expertise and independence), criminal liability, and making management sign the financial statements (to avoid the Ken Lay ignorance defense) were other wins that were not very costly to implement vs. the value investors get. Cons: Section 404, the costly part for most corporations that you often hear people complain about (the documenting and testing of control procedures, 75% of which is a waste of time in most companies), was overdone but is getting cheaper each year to execute as the PCAOB gives us better standards.

You might like the book "America Robbed Blind" by Greg Farrell (USA Today). It's a short and readable account of events and conditions leading up to SOX. Another is "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about Enron, which is also a movie, as you are probably aware. Kurt Eichenwald's "Conspiracy of Fools" on Enron is another good read, I've heard. I saw him speak at a conference; he was very good.Farcaster (talk) 03:10, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello Farcaster and thanks for responding so quickly. I do agree with your broad assessment. Regarding Enron, the main reason they went bankrupt was not because of the 'Raptors' and shell-game per se, in my opinion. If Enron had been able to hang on until now, with crude over $100 a barrel, they would have been just fine. The reason they ran into problems was because of liquidity. Specifically, Dynegy found out Enron needed the cash it generated from daily trading of oil and other commodities, and so Dynegy simply refused to do business with Enron for about a week. This caused Enron to miss the big payments to service the raptors, at which point they became a problem due to Moody's and others re-grading their debt and requiring more cash repayment at the precise time Enron could least afford such a liquidity scenario. The federal government gave Enron no bailout the way Bear Sterns and JPM got last week, however. I think the people in charge of Enron were shady but the people who lost money were stupid for having such a large percentage of their holdings in one stock. It was greed on the part of both groups. If Enron stock was around today it would be worth like $400 a share at least and I guarantee there would be no congressional hearings on what those shareholders should be doing with all the cash they would have made. LOL. I will check out your books for sure, I love reading about financial disasters. I would recommend you check out "When Genius Failed", which is about LTCM at the end of the 90s. That whole debacle was largely tied to one set of options on exposure to volatility in a Scottish housing REIT-type fund, at least the really nasty part of it was due to that. I do not like the Black/Scholes model very much, I believe Cox/Ross model for trading options is more robust and does a better job evaluating out-of-the-money options in extreme situations. Take care. DavidMSA (talk) 03:36, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello Dave...I don't have a problem with you calling Citi an investment bank. I'll look into the formal definition over the weekend. It certainly has those risks. Perhaps take a look at its latest annual report and see what it calls itself. I won't push back if you call it that in the tables; someone else might. My reason for undoing the edit you made related to the background info, which I thought belonged in the subprime lending article and wasn't sourced. Plus, be careful with op ed comments like "predictable" as a lot of risk managers at big banks would probably disagree with you! We have to try to tell both sides of such stories. Further, I'm looking for ways to shorten this article and refer to the supporting articles instead, as this one is too long by wiki standards, even though I think it merits thorough treatment. The trick is to simplify and point to supporting articles if people want to dig. So I've attempted to reduce the size of the background.Farcaster (talk) 13:00, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Ok sounds good my friend. I will do some proper citation and wait until after the weekend to go forward. Thanks for the help, I will get this wikipedia format down eventually! DavidMSA (talk) 16:41, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Yo Back

Good to hear.

L.M. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Laughingman78 (talk • contribs) 21:56, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] March 2008

A tag has been placed on David J. Anderson, Jr., requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a redirect to a user page from the main/article space.

If you can fix the redirect to point to a regular Wikipedia article rather than a user page, please do so and remove the speedy deletion tag. However, please do not remove the speedy deletion tag unless you are fixing the redirect. If you think the redirect should be retained as is for some reason, you can request that administrators wait a while before deleting it. To do this, affix the template {{hangon}} to the page and state your reasoning on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this.  This flag once was red  05:05, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Laughingman78

Hi, I'm not convinced that I was right to label Laughingman78's edits as "vandalism" - I suspect Laughingman78 has strong views about Marmion Academy and is frustrated by Wikipedia's policies. (I also suspect that there's a story here that the general public isn't aware of, but Wikipedia isn't the place to make this story known. Until, at least, the story is reported in verifiable sources - shame, because I'd love to know what the story is!)

Re: the SUCI page, it looks like the parties involved have it in hand - one of the parties reported the matter on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents and the edit warring seems to have died down.

Hope this helps,  This flag once was red  07:46, 30 March 2008 (UTC)