Page 12 - Off Balance Sheet News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> doug: tonight, the enron scandal. we have a tweet about it. wanting to know what happened about the employees who virtually lost everything. tonight, the answers from casey stegall. >> garrett ashmore started his first company from college. by graduation, the young entrepreneur landed his first job with a prestigious company in texas. >> i came to enron. i went to their pipeline side. i was very fortunate to start enron communications. >> it was the late '90s. business appeared to be booming. houston-based enron. it started to crumble in august 2001. >> they had created numerous off-balance...

You have to pay for it somehow. >> it's here to stay. >> think about what ben said about the off balance sheet nature of the u.s. that's all the stuff if you put it all together we are in trouble. that's what happened with greece. greece got into the european union because goldman sachs and other big wall street firms finagled a derivative to hide their off-balance sheet stuff and now it's coming -- >> it took them 30 years to get to that point. >> why are you blaming their problem on goldman sachs? >> you suck um to wall street constantly. >> you do. you're blaming them when it was the greeks...

Now, you could say well even 2%, even 9% capital isn't enough, but if you make it too high you start choking off lending so there is a delicate balance to be made. the bigger problem was that many of these capital requirements were honored in the breach, via derivatives, via off-balance sheet operations, complicated things that accountants and lawyers get paid, maybe some economists, too, to device. >> 15 seconds, last question. what's one source of hope for you in the next year? >> i think the source of hope is the economy is starting to show life. the consumer, unlike a lot of fears that wer...

Problems that we -- the questions that we confronted in 2008. >> they are. except there are 17 different countries trying to confront them together rather than china. >> so let's go to the next chart. >> okay. so take a look at the debt, which is on joe's mind. if you look at simply -- what we would call federal debt or central government debt, china is way ahead with 17% debt. to gdp, we're at 62, as you know. we won't talk here about the unfunded liabilities. but this next number is the one that i know joe is focused on if i can circle it, which is when you look at all of our debt, state, fe...

Cents behind every dollar of loans? >> it was also the unbalanced sheet leverage versus the unhidden -- >> tell us more about that. >> well there is stated mortgage on the balance sheet -- >> then 2 or 3 itself- >> right. depending on where you were in the cycle it would balloon to 120%. it was a disaster in terms of the leverage they carried but they taught the banks as well. so citi we when started finding out about the structure investsment vehicles, the off balance sheet, that they wornt consolidating, hidden from investors, hidden from the public and we ended up having to bail them out on...