It may be a true statement. What did Gramm do for UBS?  I'm guessing he was not pricing derivatives or forecasting asset class performance.  I'm thinking something that has more to do with lobbying, which gives him some plausible deniability over pesky things like high-risk lending/investing practices.

Ok. Either he's lying or he GROSSLY negligent. It's one or the other.

As a former journo-type, I've always had a soft spot for evergreen headlines - they're such time-savers!

"Phil Gramm, Liar"

"Taxes Due April 15"

"Sun Rises In East"

"Sun Sets In West"

"Cubs Eliminated"

"Review: Springsteen Rocks House"

"Franco Still Dead"

<i>It may be a true statement. What did Gramm do for UBS?  I'm guessing he was not pricing derivatives or forecasting asset class performance</i>

As Vice Chairman he still should have been attending Board meetings, and there's no way that the bank's portfolio wasn't discussed there, if only at a high level.  He's lying.

I'm shocked - shocked! - to find there are subprime mortgages in this establishment!

It's a mite bit more complicated than that, as Robert ("Few, if Any") Rubin has pointed out and as Krugman has noted: krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/.../the-few-the-proud-the-ignored

"Dean Baker is mad at Robert Rubin for suggesting that “few, if any” people saw the financial meltdown coming. I’d say that there are two levels to this. First, a lot of people — including Dean, me, Calculated Risk, and others — saw that there was a huge housing bubble. It remains amazing that so many alleged experts failed to see the obvious.

What’s going on now, however, is beyond that: the “financial accelerator,” with deleveraging causing a credit crunch that forces further deleveraging, and now threatens to produce a sort of pancake collapse of the whole system, was not, I think, so widely foreseen. Certainly Nouriel Roubini was on the right track; I can claim to have described something quite a lot like what’s now happening, though I covered myself by making it a slightly jokey scenario rather than a straight prediction. But in Rubin’s defense, I don’t think many people saw how much the system itself would break down.

"Cubs eliminated"  ??

C'mon,  it's only the second game of the season....

Maybe he is not a liar... maybe he is just STOOOPID and very uninformed... maybe he shouldn't be vice chairman of UBS... maybe that's the problem with these banks... they have idiots running them.

So Bob Rubin's an idiot? That's an awfully high bar.

Funny, everyone seems to have forgotten that none other than Paul Krugman was a consultant to the first and greatest of the Off Balance Sheet manipulators, that energy trading firm in Houston.... what was their name...

Lots of blame to go around on this one, folks. It's not a partisan issue.

Echoing Annabella's comments, 'wizards' like Rubin have been telling everyone how smart they are and therefore implied they'd see something like this coming along.  Using this so called talent for collateral, they've argued for much less regulation, as well as lobbying extensively to not have to contribute to paying for any bailout (little or no taxes).

No one on this site should be making any excuses for Rubin or his buddies.

It's not so much that the Rubin's idiots as I've posted, it's that they've argued that they're smart enough to avoid melt down's like this and therefore shouldn't have to have any oversight or have pay for a bailout (although I'd challenge the notion that that their 'that smart').

You can't defend them unless you enjoy bailing out rich people to the tune of $30 billion dollars who have no interest in helping you out, and who knows how much it will be next time now that us suckers are defending their ability to run the economy to the brink of disaster (as Noam put it, "where's the moral hazard now?).

I mean really, are smart people here really defending this reckless malfeasance?

I'm not defending anyone, except maybe that tiny handful of individuals who, alone out of millions of experts and market participants, correctly predicted that off balance sheet transactions created extraordinary and systemic risk. The only such person I know of is Warren Buffett. Bully for Buffett. But Krugman didn't predict this. Neither did Joe Stiglitz ,or Bob Kuttner, or any of the other leading economic lights of the Left. Who am I missing here?

Or maybe you mean to tell us that YOU predicted this?