Quoi, je m'inquiete? Je lis 'Mad'

Wall Street's Mr. Fabu-less

By Dana Milbank
WashPost
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Fabulous Fab was having another less-than-fabulous day.

Goldman Sachs whiz kid Fabrice Tourre is fast becoming the poster boy of the financial crisis, a Michael Milken for the current times. Last week, the SEC filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and the 31-year-old Frenchman who calls himself Fabulous Fab. And on Tuesday, Fabulous sat before a Senate panel that wanted to know how he helped a hedge-fund tycoon make a billion dollars by dumping worthless mortgage securities on unsuspecting Goldman customers and then betting against those same securities -- all the while accelerating the burst of the housing bubble and the downfall of the world economy.

"The whole building is about to collapse anytime now," Fabulous wrote in one of the e-mails that have come to light. "Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab . . . standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!!"

Fabulous, in an e-mail from 2007, described the mortgage business as "totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last too long!!!" Yet two months later, he boasted that he had managed to dump some more of the worthless mortgage securities on "widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport."

(More here.)