Mana From Heaven - Thoughts from Michael Lewis and David Einhorn

In my world this is all the buzz. IT IS A MUST READ!! The New York Times Op Ed section today was taken over by joint writers David Einhorn and Michael Lewis. Both unbelievable writers and both with careers and/or ties to Wall St. It summarizes much more eloquently and completely many things I have been saying for months on this blog, in my quarterly investment letters, and in private. It is the eureka of eurekas. Will it catch the eyes and ears of anyone in Washington to spark meaningful change? I remain doubtful but I have been and will continue to be avoiding the latest hope buying on Wall St unless some of this stuff gains momentum. If that happens then maybe I will even have some hope to spend on some significant purchases. There are two parts. The first describing what went wrong and the second with ideas of solutions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhornb.html

Mr. Paulson must have had some reason for doing what he did. No doubt he still believes that without all this frantic activity we’d be far worse off than we are now. All we know for sure, however, is that the Treasury’s heroic deal-making has had little effect on what it claims is the problem at hand: the collapse of confidence in the companies atop our financial system.