General

From Wall Street facilitator to humble oyster farmer

Michael Osinski wrote the software that was widely used to package mortgages into bonds

Michael Osinski wrote the software that was widely used to package mortgages into bonds. He’s “the Facilitator”—the guy who helped make this entire financial mess possible. It was a process, he writes in New York magazine, that began when he worked at Lehman in the late 1980s and continued for 13 years. Osiniski describes the six-figure bonuses and the juvenile antics of the Wall Street mortgage traders he worked beside, and the descent into a “bizarre” and “fishy” world. At 45, he retired. He’s now an Oyster farmer. As for the meltdown, “I hadn’t anticipated it, but at the same time, nothing about it surprised me,” he writes.

New York

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