And Still I Persist

Anyone who has been following the financial news knows that banks and other large financial institutions are under a growing amount of strain given the misguided investments in speculative ventures over the past 5 years, including mortgages and exotic credit / investment packages.

While chasing down what state a company like Merrill-Lynch might be tough, banks are required to report data to the FDIC. The bad news is you end up with a massive pile of tabular text data that makes for potent nap fuel. Readers will recall that my team has been working on new techniques for finding and presenting massive information sets, a technology based on mashups and the semantic web we call Boomerang.

We decided to apply the Boomerang approach to this mass of data, adding in some ideas from the groundbreaking gapmider.org effort to create a dynamic overview of just how tough it’s getting for banks and their mortgage portfolios.

Charts and data after the jump.
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[UPDATED 03/14/08: In fairness to Gov. Spitzer, I’ll note that this article in the New York Times today says that Spitzer has claimed to his aides this week that he used prostitutes “only in the past eight months”, which directly contradicts the press reports citing sources that claim that Spitzer had been using prostitutes either since 2002 or since 1998. We’ll have to wait to see which claim holds up.]

With all the ‘net and media coverage of (now-former) NY Governor Eliot Spitzer’s decline and fall from office, I’ve only seen one posting (I’ll link when/if I find it again) in the past 48 hours [since Monday morning] that touches upon how profound Spitzer’s problems are, though I am sure there are others.

It appears now that Spitzer was making use of one or more high-end prostitution rings during his time as NY State Attorney General. At that same time, he prosecuted at least two other prostitution rings.

Simply put, as State Attorney General, Spitzer reduced the competition for the prostitution ring he personally used, while leaving that p-ring untouched.

Stop and think about that.

The heart of this issue isn’t about sex, it’s not about the Mann Act, it’s not about ’structuring’, and it’s not even just about making use of a criminal enterprise. It’s about the most profound type of corruption that an AG can succumb to: helping out the criminal enterprise that he personally is doing business with by going after its competition.

Now it may turn out that the p-ring(s) that Spitzer used as AG were not direct competitors of the p-rings he prosecuted. But that’s going to be hard for Spitzer to prove in his defense. I’m sure that both the Feds and NY AG Andrew Cuomo — who currently isn’t on the best of terms with Spitzer, and who may want to distance himself even more from him — are going to look long and hard at that ‘conflict of interest’. ..bruce w..