How the inventors of Dragon speech recogniton technology lost everything.

cjsm writes: James and Janet Baker were the inventors of Dragon Systems speech recogintion software, and after years of work, they created a multimillion dollar company. At the height of the tech boom, with investment offers rolling in, they turned to Goldman Sachs for financial advice. For a five million dollar fee, Goldman hooked them up with Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgium speech recognition company. After consultations with Goldman Sachs, the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock. But it turned out Lernout & Hauspie was involved in cooking their books and went bankrupt. Dragon was sold in a bankruptcy auction to Scansoft, and the Bakers lost everything. Goldman and Sachs itself had decided against investing in Lernout & Hauspie two years previous to this because they were lying about their Asian sales. The Bakers are suing for one billions dollars.

After consultation with Goldman Sachs

[Kupfernigk]

There's their problem, right there. Why would anybody in their right mind go to a bank for financial advice? It's like going to King Herod for advice on childcare. And then they accepted a stock swap. Didn't any alarm bells ring right then? "You don't get any actual money, you get these pieces of paper that you can't sell in large amounts because if you do, the value of the rest of them will fall. And their current value is part of a bubble."

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

Yeah, hindsight is golden.

The few who actually predicted the crash of 2008 (like Schiff for one, and Spansberry for another) were not paid attention to by most people because in order to believe them, you also had to believe that Bush and Obama were both full of bullshit.

And of course they were, but a lot of people STILL don't believe it. That's why your meat costs twice what it did 2 years ago.

Rewriting history

[Kupfernigk]

Oh, come on. All the tools for identifying bubbles and unsustainable booms have been around since the Wall Street Crash. It wasn't hindsight. It was just a little critical thinking - all the evidence was there if anybody cared to look for it, and a lot of people who did made a lot of money once they had worked out how to short the bubble. Me, I had as much of my money out of the market and into cash as soon as the first rumbles started in 2007.

People who say it was hard to see coming are just justifying the

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

We are talking about different things in the first part here.

"All the tools for identifying bubbles and unsustainable booms have been around since the Wall Street Crash."

So? I was referring to BEFORE the crash. And definitely before the biggest part of it.

"It wasn't hindsight."

When I mentioned hindsight, I was referring to GP's comment, not to what you are referring to here. Besides, if you say they have been around SINCE the crash, YOU are still talking about hindsight.

"Me, I had as much of my money out of the market and into cash as soon as the first rumbles started in 2007."

That's nice, but you still have to admit that government prognosticators and "mainstream" economists were still preaching that everything was fine, right up to the cras

GS are crooks, everyone knows that

[cheekyboy]

My god, why is it the normal low circles and far lefties and hippies know that GS are big bunch of crooks worse than madoff.

Lesson to all, never sell for 100% shares, 25% max, rest in cash n gold.