Fifty Billion!
According to Niall Ferguson, who was born in '64, American dollars are worth 1/7 of what they were then. By a quick calculation, Pops who raised us in a 30k house with a mortgage payment of $177 a month... OK I am still moving my family forward. That's good news. I have to make these kinds of adjustments in my thinking when I try to understand what these billions are. It's hard to get my head around the idea that somebody has been bilked out of that much money.
See when I was a kid, I used to have New York envy. How come LA didn't have big skyscrapers like NY? Were we too poor a city? I mean it was bad enough that the Rams lost to the Cowboys every damned year, but short buildings too? So during the days of the Bunker Hill development and especially when the First Interstate and much later the Library Tower I paid attention to how much. A seventy story high rise skyscraper costs about 120 million bucks and takes two years to build. That's a good benchmark.
So basically this financial terrorist stole something on the order of Chicago, and LA, and Philadelphia's combined skylines. And then some.
Levitt on Bloomberg said yesterday that the SEC is going to get overhauled. The clamps are coming down like cement elephants. I just love it. I'm really thinking about exactly how the big accounting firms are going to beef up their auditing departments. I had a brief discussion with one of my peers about how auditors actually operate. I cannot recall them plugging into computer systems. Most auditing is done by hand. So naturally I'm thinking about e-discovery and forensic computing as part and parcel of a new regime of auditing on a go foreward basis. How do you serve the equivalent of an electronic subpoena? Because there have to be footprints. You cannot move that kind of money without leaving some tracks.
A new day is coming, and for a time the suckers market will be safer. I'm looking forward to escalating transparency.
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