Wednesday, June 8, 2011

UNITED STATES - The new life of Michael O.

On the dock of his house overlooking the bay of Greenport [in Long Island, NY], Michael Osinski open a few oysters. "How is John Howard?" Asks the former Wall Street executive about Jean-Stéphane Bron, the Swiss director of Cleveland against Wall Street [2010] the film in which Michael Osinski confess the faults and excesses of a financial tempted by the profits offered by the mortgage, the famous subprime.

He himself has been the source of this system with the computer program he invented that allows to transform the mortgage bonds. "I do not think I have committed fraud. I do not feel like a criminal or as someone who has misled people. "The bomb he helped shape with his program has put the U.S.

economy to its knees and caused millions of casualties among families countries that have lost their homes. Two years ago, Michael Osinski decided to confide. "I pledge publicly, because nobody in the middle does not want to talk about what happened. It is important that people understand how we got here.

"For him, financiers, consumers and politicians all have their share of responsibility for the subprime crisis. He points to the Americans who were desperate to become homeowners even if they could not afford. "My fellow citizens mistakenly believe that owning your own home is an asset when it is a liability.

They pay taxes, repairs, interest. Yet if you asked three years ago the Americans what was their most important, 99.9% met you it was their home. "Michael Osinski has left Wall Street in 2001, well before the explosion housing bubble. With his departure, he found himself with money, property in Greenport and time consuming.

He discovered the oyster by accident. "I sold my business and had nothing to do," he says with his two black Labradors. Standing on the dock, he claims expertise it took ten years to develop. He lives at a rate of shrimp he sells today 75 cents (0.52 euro) a piece to the great restaurants in New York.

"I work hard. When I finish the evening, I know the boat waiting for me tomorrow. It's very pleasant to work on the water. "Born in Mobile in Alabama there are fifty-seven, the man who helped to bomb the U.S. economy has always dreamed of owning a farm on the edge of water. But first he studied journalism in Florida.

He began his career in a small business magazine in Atlanta. When his fiancée, Isabel (now wife), has fallen gravely ill, he applied for a job in the department of Emory University for her to be treated in the hospital of the faculty. The job was to create a database, but he put Michael Osinski towards computer programming.

In 1985 he moved to New York with Isabel and got a job in the investment bank Salomon Brothers on Wall Street. After scouring several financial companies, in 1995 he began a collaboration with Intex, the company that sold the securitization program for big investment banks. During the five years after he wrote and developed the program that will allow them to generalize subprime.

Michael Osinski scrapes the bottom of an oyster knife with her. The interior of the shell is perfectly white. "If it does not stain, it means he is perfectly healthy," he said with a hint of pride in his voice. You can eat my oysters without fear. The water is extremely clean. "His vocabulary recalls his fifteen years in finance.

It describes the rate of return on its oysters - "more than all my other investments" - and says that the book itself its seafood restaurants in New York to avoid intermediaries. It put its house bought in 1999 for 900,000 dollars in the asset column, as it pulls "between 100,000 and 150,000 dollars in cash flow per year" for its oysters.

It has sold 200,000 last year and this volume will increase fivefold in the next few years. Its success, he hopes, will attract other growers in Greenport. "We are only four to raise oysters in the region. Before, two trains full of oysters each day leaving Greenport to New York. But in five years we will be fifty.

This will be good for business. "

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