The Lehman family and Jimmy Cayne lost most of their wealth because Goldman owns American Politicians; it's a simple as that.
Goldman has reestablished the battlefield, reduced competitors, and now hogs a much larger piece of the pie, whether it be trading, floating corporate or muni bonds, or shaving points for institutional investing.
Everyone felt great riding the gravy train of exploding equity prices from 2004 to 2007.
Who didn't feel high on many stocks in their portfolios that went up 25 to 50 times in that period? - agri stocks, some tech, some true crap like HANS; many of these people have not only lost 50% or more of the money they had once on paper, their other assets, such as homes and property have crashed, and they have boats and other non-income producing expenses that are bleeding them dry.
Now, some are buying into the massive bullshit the green shoots crowd is sprinkling in the media daily, as they see equity indexes rise (in a very uneven, peculiar way, I might add), and they are tempted to abandon their distrust of the machine that destroyed them, only to contribute some of what they have left (if anything, for those who still do), to leach that money into the markets if they start believing they're going to miss a good thing.
Fear and greed. We may be transitioning from fear to greed at one of the worst times ever, as the economy continues to fall into the shit.
It will be extremely interesting to see if the market stabilizes, or rises a little more, or rises a significant amount more, and then the realization that debt is floating all sets in, as mass unemployment worsens and spreads, and business and consumer BKs absolutely explode, only to tank the markets yet again, soon after the massive crash of '07.
I'm not sure their will be any walking away from that car crash when it inevitably happens.
Dr. Zhifagda knows nothing about me, or he'd know I cashed out when the cashing out was good in the RE business, and I'm perfectly happy in my position of liquidity, being able to pick and choose opportunities at my leisure. He's another piker who needs the markets to keep rising to have any hope of eating or paying his bills, hence his desperation gives rise to his bullish bias.
