Overleveraged, Overconfident
Hosting, researching and writing a podcast on major U.S. banking scandals and financial failures. This covers sourcing the story, verifying the facts, and scripting the narrative arc from the ground up.
All 8 episodes are available on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Buzzsprout.
Featured Episode
The Blacklist Boss: Osman Semerci’s Global CDO Meltdown and Tax Fraud Comeback
Osman Semerci talked his way into running Merrill Lynch's fixed income division by threatening to quit — and then, in under two years, built $44 billion in CDO exposure the firm couldn't sell, misrepresented the risk to Merrill's board, and helped force the bank into a $50 billion fire-sale to Bank of America. He was fired, denied taking an envelope of cash from under his desk on the way out, and resurfaced in Europe — where he was later convicted in Germany's Cum-Ex dividend tax fraud scheme, one of the largest tax heists in European history. Same appetite, different continent, same ending: someone else's money, someone else's problem.
The Creative Process: Built from 14 sources , anchored by Greg Farrell's Crash of the Titans, the definitive account of Merrill Lynch's collapse, cross-referenced against 13 additional sources spanning German newscasts, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Bloomberg. The 13 articles were organized and cross-referenced in Google's NotebookLM, allowing facts and quotes to be checked against each other. The script is drafted with an opening on the current legal troubles of Semeric in connection to Cum-Cum scandal in Germany. The narrative then moves to his connection to the Great Financial Crisis, the toppling of Merrill Lynch, and the senior management’s blind eye to the risks of the massive Collaterialized Debt Obiligation (CDO) portfolio Semeric had amassed as the market had turned against him. This is the most downloaded episode on Buzzsprout.