Friday, June 01, 2007

Most Ironic Quote-of-the-Day

In a Bloomberg news blurb about the toxic waste tranches of CDOs. Chris Street Treasurer of Orange County California commented on the riskiness and appropriateness of such highly leveraged derivative instruments in public portfolios:
``It's grossly inappropriate to take this level of risk.''
``Fund managers wanted the high yield, so Wall Street sold it to them. The beauty of Wall Street is they put lipstick on a pig.''

Hmmmm. One must wonder whether or not an Orange County Treasurer is the best one to proffer advice on risky securities to others. Can anyone spell "h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e" ??

3 comments:

Macro Man said...

Well, it's not exactly like Bob 'Sour Lemon' Citron is making these comments. I wonder what Mr. C is doing these days....

But agreed, there is an element of irony here!

"Cassandra" said...

I submit to you that I am indeed reaching, since Irony is in short supply these days as the markets focus their earnest attention upon the impending PE consortia bid for the entire Russell 1000 en masse. Your money supply numbers for Russia, were indeed poignant, and with Kuwait jumping ship, and others certainly to follow, Voldemort may be left with more dollars that they can take down. "NakedCapitalism " has a nice synopsis of Jim Grant's take on the kuwaiti tell-tale for dollar hegemony. In the meantime, the equity party continues unabated...

Anonymous said...

It's a beauty, alright - but I'd rather listen to Bukowski than an AA facilitator anyday.