The Issues The radio program draws an overall picture of the subprime mortgage crisis, how the subprime market was created, how the crisis happened, what were the result and its impact. (See appendix A - my summary of the case) The primary issues in this case are: why did the Wall Street bankers blindly trust that the risky mortgages were good assets to invest into? And why did everyone involved allow the whole thing to go this far? The Analysis The Wall Street bankers ignored the fact that
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The Giant Pool of Money The individuals in the radio story fell prey to the confirmation bias/heuristic and availability bias/heuristic. The confirmation bias refers to “The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms Preconceptions”. The giant pool of money, which refers the subset of global savings allocated for fixed income securities, amounted to $70 trillion in 2006. In this case, the central banker held fed interest rate to a low level of 1%. The global army
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The Giant Pool of Money Analysis The housing crisis that occurred less than a decade ago is a great example, and has become an extensively covered case study, of how dangerous certain biases and heuristics can become if left unchecked on a massive scale. Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, in collaboration with NPR News, put together a special program titled “The Giant Pool of Money,” where they explore just how the phenomenon occurred and the underlying factors that contributed through sound bites
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Bankruptcy of a Retail Giant Blunders by former Chairman Charles Conaway and President Mark Schwartz led Kmart into bankruptcy. The retailer had to close 284 stores, including this one in Novi, and lay off 22,000 workers. They lived the good life of gated estates, a 47-foot yacht, corporate jets at their beck and call, and multiple pay hikes, perks, bonuses and loans. But even as Kmart Corp. struggled for survival, its chairman, Charles Conaway, and president, Mark Schwartz, wanted more, renegotiating
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Derivative triggered the financial terror Jiho Jang Warren Buffett already said the derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.” It’s not surprising. The derivative products have triggered the most destructive financial crisis since the stock market crash in our history. The causes of financial crisis in the late 2000s are still controversial. Some assert that it is just the financial system, and regulation failure and the other insist that resulted from the financial engineering
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Giant Pool of Money In this radio story about the events leading up to the subprime mortgage crisis, it’s clearly demonstrated that a few psychological biases and heuristics were present and played important roles in forming the crisis. The most critical ones I’ve identified are the confirmation bias and the social proof phenomenon in the development of the crisis. Confirmation Bias Mainly two types of confirmation bias were observed in the subprime crisis: the confirmation trap as well as anchoring
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40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard. It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they'd be beneath your average street thug. Bank
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(MLBPA) has been around only since 1965 when they hired Marvin Miller to negotiate the collective bargaining agreement in 1968 (Major League Baseball Players Association, 2012). With a new collective bargaining agreement signed in 2011 this paper will review some of the issues that Major League Baseball and the Pittsburgh Pirates may encounter and how they can be overcome. Legal Problems and Solutions One major legal issue facing Major League Baseball and the Players Association today is the issue
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eLearning programs, including online courses and simulations. In addition to material from Harvard Business School and Harvard Business Review, we also offer course material from these renowned institutions and publications: Babson College Business Enterprise Trust Business Expert Press Business Horizons Magazine California Management Review Darden School of Business Design Management Institute HEC Montréal Centre for Case Studies Ivey School of Business International
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09-093 July 22, 2009 The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 – 2009: The Role of Greed, Fear and Oligarchs Cate Reavis Free enterprise is always the right answer. The problem with it is that it ignores the human element. It does not take into account the complexities of human behavior. 1 —Andrew Lo, Professor of Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a
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