John Moon Interviewed in Gone Rogue Podcast on The Day Wall Street Stopped, the 2008 Story

Olshan litigation partner John Moon was interviewed in an episode of the podcast Gone Rogue entitled “The Day Wall Street Stopped, the 2008 Story.” Gone Rogue is broadcast from London and features international speakers from the fields of finance, law and governmental regulation. The episode explores the causes and repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis and how systemic compliance failures across Wall Street helped turn a housing downturn into a global financial meltdown. “There was sort of a lot of permissiveness in the system that permitted subprime borrowers to have very low down payments on their homes and in some instances produce less documentation of their financial wherewithal,” John explains, “and those were called ‘no-doc’ or ‘low-doc’ loans. In the common parlance on Wall Street, they were called ‘liar loans’ because the borrower could really say whatever they wanted to about their financial wherewithal.” He goes on to note that “$11 trillion in household wealth evaporated in a couple months. It was astounding.” Concerning the consequences of the crash, John says, “For one thing, people forget that during the financial crisis, there was a spike in inflation, so many people had adjustable-rate mortgages and their mortgage payments went up even though the value of their homes plummeted. The consequences were beyond imagination. For example, people just could not sell their homes, so if you got a new job in a different town, you could not move. There were stories of people who got divorced and had to stay in the same house together because they could not sell their residence. It is not a time that I would ever want to go back to.”