万花筒 2008-09-17&09-19 华尔街金融危机浅析（在线收听）

We used to have five major Wall Street firms, now we are down to two, and the meltdown of the three that we've seen, although Merrill by the way is not a meltdown. It was sold at a premium and a big number actually, which is, I think, has been underreported. But reason that at least two of these firms have melted down is because the model that has reigned on Wall Street for decades is really a very bad model, especially for shareholders. These companies are focused on the employees and are run completely for the benefit of their employees and not the shareholders. Let me give you some examples.

Lehman had the leverage of around 30 times, er, its book value which was over 20 billion, so it had a 700-billon-dollar balance sheet (which) was lately reduced to around 600 billion when they were claiming to (quote) "Deleverage", so that's like having a mortgage on your house, that's a 97% mortgage, if the value of your house drops, inevitably in a bubble market in housing which is one of the reasons why these companies are in trouble, you lose all your equity. That's what happened to these firms, they were enormously over-leveraged, and when the market turned against them, they lost all their book value which we just saw clearly was illustrated by what the banks decided, ah, on Sunday, when they decided not to bail them out.

Um, but, when they get lucky, and interest rates drop which has happened almost all through Lehman's history, cause' it went public in 1994, the value of those assets swells enormously and they all look like geniuses, but eventually the market turns against them, the leverage bites the wrong way, and none of the huge pay that these companies are paying out to their employees ever comes back. Uh, and We saw pay-scales at Lehman and all these firms, they are unprecedented in and outside of Hollywood, maybe, or maybe hedge funds. And they were completely undeserved, because they were strictly making money because of luck and huge leverage.