John Thain. “The bankers and traders dealing in CDOs didn't understand what they were doing, John Thain said in a recent speech; ‘To model correctly one tranche of one CDO took about three hours on one of the fastest computers in the United States. There is no chance that pretty much anybody understood what they were doing with these securities. Creating things that you don’t understand is really not a good idea no matter who owns it,’ the former Merrill Lynch chief executive said in a speech this month, according to Financial News.” Business Insider, October 7, 2009.

Donald R. van Deventer
Kamakura Corporation
Honolulu, October 7, 2009