Good morning. Hope you had a good weekend. Where’s the outrage over Fannie and Freddie? A good question to start the week:
Fannie and Freddie: The biggest bailout (New York Post)
It is highly likely that taxpayers will lose well over $200 billion — and it may well pass $300 billion. When the history of the crisis is all written, these two institutions will turn out to be the most costly of the financial sector — worse than AIG, Citigroup or Bank of America/Merrill Lynch…
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are where they are because they were run as the largest hedge funds on the planet.
The housing market isn’t going to “recover” (Christian Science Monitor)
What would you rather have, a mutual fund growing at 10% per year…or a house that goes up by 10% per year? The house! Because you can live in it…and show it off. So you leverage up…you buy twice the house you can afford. You live better. And you make more money.
Those days are over. But, not everyone realizes it.
Finding a job is hard, even for the most educated (NPR)
“I think the recession in a way is pretty traumatic,” says Max Caldwell, managing principal for Towers Watson, an HR consulting firm. The healthy response, he says, is for graduates to start managing their own career development, and rely less on employers to provide training and advancement.
Day Traders 2.0: Wired, angry and loving it (New York Times)
“There’s this idea out there that retail investors are dumb,” says Howard Lindzon, the co-founder of StockTwits, which curates a gusher of stock tips and financial news alerts tweeted by 20,000 regular contributors. “Well, it turns out that the institutional investors are pretty dumb. They nearly blew us all up with leverage.”
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