Greg Smith Is Right, And I Should Know

``At Merrill Lynch, where I worked for many years in equity sales, we were suddenly expected to sell CDO equity, the illiquid highly leveraged toxic leftovers of the Collateralized Debt Obligation creation process.  We were told that if we expected to get paid, we had to sell these "high margin" products, regardless of the fact that selling CDO equity was akin to selling your accounts financial poison.  We were constantly reminded that Goldman was doing it, and that was why their ROE was so much better than Merrill's.''