A Great Archival Bloomberg Article About Dirty Banking

Bloomberg News today posted a series of articles from as far back as May 2000. I was struck particularly by the June 2007 article entitled “Banks Sell `Toxic Waste’ CDOs to Calpers, Texas Teachers Fund.” A juicy tidbit:

“At a sales presentation of the bank’s CDOs to 50 public pension fund managers in a Las Vegas hotel ballroom, Jean Fleischhacker, Bear Stearns senior managing director, tells fund managers they can get a 20 percent annual return from the bottom level of a CDO.

“It has a very high cash yield to it,” Fleischhacker says at the March convention. “I think a lot of people are confused about what this product is and how it works.”