Danny Schechter - ColdType

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Much of the media missed the event that triggered the collapse:
the crash of Carlyle Capital, a huge Hedge fund, and
offshoot of the Carlyle Group, that was overleveraged with
borrowed money and connected to prominent politicians,
wealthy investors all over the world including the Middle East.
It claimed to control $22 Billion on a capital base of under $700
million. As Lorretta Napoleoni reports in her Rogue Economics,
“the crash of Carlyle Capital, dragged Bear Stearns, its major
creditor, into insolvency.” Many of the superstars of the Globalization
elite took a big hit, but their names and positions
escaped media scrutiny.
Most of the news focus was on the firm’s larger than life,
bridge playing CEO Jimmy Cayne because he was a mediagenic
character. His personality seemed to overhang the story even
if he was personally playing at a bridge competition when his
good ship Bear [BS] went down.
According to William Cohan’s book on Bear’s rise and fall,
House of Cards, Bear’s behavior mirrored and set the standard
for what was going on on “The Street.”
The leaders of Wall Street affirmatively made decisions year
after year that made their firms extraordinarily highly leveraged
and risky enterprises. They created a 24x7 production
line that manufactured and sold hundreds of billions of dollars
worth of mortgage-backed, and other asset-backed, securities
placing them with investors all over the globe who were
seduced by their high yields and their phony AAA ratings.
Their reward was huge eight-figure bonuses year after year.
What a great business! Over time, as the market choked on
what they were selling, firms like Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill
Lynch and Citigroup, had to lard more and more of these
securities on their exploding balance sheets, all supported by
an increasingly smaller and smaller slice of equity.
What brought the whole proverbial house of cards to its present
calamitous state was the further decision these firms
made to use the risky securities on their balance sheets