[Remember the good old days when the American Economics Association would pay attention to this kind of stuff?]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/business/dealbook/after-financial-crisis-fates-of-lender-and-borrower-diverge.html Timothy L. Blixseth, a 65-year-old former billionaire, now sits in his eighth week of solitary confinement in a county jail in Great Falls, Mont., one of the few people being held accountable in connection with Wall Street’s profligate behavior in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. He is not even a banker. Rather, Mr. Blixseth was a client of a group of Credit Suisse bankers who were rewarded handsomely from 2004 to 2006 for making $3 billion in aggressive senior secured loans to developers of luxury resorts in the West with little concern for how the money was going to be used. After making the loans, the Credit Suisse bankers, led by a managing director, David Miller, syndicated them to investors around the world, earning large fees for themselves. None of the loans remained on the bank’s balance sheet. Mr. Miller knew he had created a bonus machine for himself and his team. In an August 2005 email to a colleague that appeared in a 2011 court filing, Mr. Miller wrote, “These are aggressive deals and it is in all of our best interests that the investors are protected, because if one of them should blow up, you will see these investors pull out of this land development mkt and our gravy train will stop.” Mr. Miller was right about that. In the end, all of the loans blew up, including those made to resorts like the Tamarack Resort in Idaho ($250 million); Lake Las Vegas, a 3,592-acre golf community in Nevada ($540 million); Promontory, a 10-square-mile second-home resort outside Park City, Utah ($275 million); the Turtle Bay Resort in Hawaii ($400 million); and to Ginn resorts in Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Naples, Fla.; Boone, N.C.; and the Bahamas ($675 million). After each of the developments ended up in Bankruptcy Court, a federal bankruptcy judge admonished the Credit Suisse bankers by calling the loans “doomed to failure” from the outset. Mr. Miller and his team made one of their most aggressive loans to Mr. Blixseth, a land and timber baron who in the 1990s assembled a huge tract of mountainous land an hour outside of Bozeman, Mont. — including a land swap with the federal government that required an act of Congress — and built on it the highly exclusive Yellowstone Club, home to more than 500 wealthy members like Bill Gates, Peter Chernin, Tom Brady and Justin Timberlake. Each paid millions of dollars to build homes there and have access to the property’s private ski slopes, among other perks. [snip] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
