NEW YORK: As world leaders were putting the finishing touches to their G20 communique in London last week, Michael Osinski was up to his thighs in water on the other side of the Atlantic, retrieving oyster cages at low tide off a misty Long Island.
Nowadays he supplies oysters to some of the best restaurants in Manhattan. But in his previous incarnation, Mr Osinski played a crucial, if inadvertent, role in stirring up the financial whirlwind that has battered the world. As the top computer programmer for the titans of Wall Street, he wrote the complex software that bundled home mortgages into bonds, making possible the subprime loans collapse that sparked the global meltdown.
"I didn't realise I was building a bomb at the time," said Mr Osinski, 55, as he reflected on his part in the worst slump since the Great Depression. "I thought I was building something that was a valuable tool for the industry. And for many years, it was." But, he added, "the software turned out to be more sophisticated than the people using it".
Mr Osinski decided to go public about his contribution to the crisis after two encounters in the same day. "I was in a coffee shop near my home and got talking to a stranger about what I used to do and at the end he said: 'You're the devil'.
"And shortly afterwards, I saw a friend and neighbour and he told me: 'You're the facilitator'."
So how does he feel about being so intimately involved in a process that has devastated the savings of family, friends and strangers? "I feel very bad and certainly somewhat responsible. It nags at me. But ultimately I feel more dismay than guilt that my work was used like this."
Mr Osinski bounced around various Wall Street firms after landing his first job at Salomon Brothers in 1985. In 1995 he ended up with the company that supplied the software for nearly all the big finance houses. It was also around then that a client asked him to enhance his software to include a new ingredient - "subprime" debt. Mr Osinski's reaction was excitement at the prospect of new customers and new challenges.
After he left Wall Street in 2001, the financial institutions developed ever more complex, mysterious and risky financial instruments, but still relied on the industry standard programs Mr Osinski developed.
He has regrets every day, but they are tempered with the belief that others misused his work, sometimes fraudulently.
Source : Sydney Morning Herald, 06.04.09
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