Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
Financial crooks brought down the world's economy--but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
by Matt Taibbi - Rolling Stone
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars. (my gold)
Read the entire article here
4 COMMENTS:
Does anyone read these articles because nothing is changing...imagine if your name was mentioned in that Taibbi article...you would be sitting in a holding pen...
How Goldman Killed A.I.G.
As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report makes convincingly clear, Goldman has to finally admit publicly the important role its marks played in exacerbating the financial woes of its competitors. The other lesson is that these kinds of complex securities, and the derivatives tied to them, should in the future be traded on public exchanges, where prices can be far more easily agreed upon between buyers and sellers. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law calls for the latter, but it hasn’t happened yet. Contrary to the critics, the commission report is the strongest argument we have to get those regulators moving.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/how-goldman-killed-a-i-g-and-other-stories/?hp
This Game is FAR from Over
Before I get into it, I want to send out a heartfelt thank you to everybody involved in this epic battle for decency in the global monetary and financial system. Many of the people that I have collaborated with over the incredible period of my life which has been the past year were, like me, completely brainwashed about how things really worked for much of our lives. Upon finding out the truth, we quickly understood that silence is was not an option. Not speaking up and fighting against the cruel and unjust system in place today is the equivalent of not fighting against slavery one hundred and fifty years ago.
Thanks to people like Matt and countless others, this story is NOT GOING AWAY. The oligarchs and financial politburo running the United States at the moment through regulatory and judicial capture that stretches from Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and the executives at the too big to fail banks all think they have gotten away with it all. They haven’t gotten away with anything.
http://maxkeiser.com/2011/02/17/latest-from-michael-krieger/#more-21783
How Goldman Killed A.I.G.
The conventional wisdom has it that the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was a low-budget flop, hopelessly riven by internal political disputes and dissension among the commission’s 10 members. As usual, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Actually, the report — and the online archive of testimony, interviews and documents that are now available — is a treasure trove of invaluable information about the causes and consequences of the Great Recession.
For instance, on the exceptionally important but little understood role played by the increasingly lower prices Goldman Sachs placed on the complex mortgage securities on its balance sheet — which helped determine the fate of many of its shakier Wall Street brethren — the commission report, on page 237, is crystalline:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/how-goldman-killed-a-i-g-and-other-stories/?hp
Dylan Ratigan: Where Are The Damn Handcuffs?
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=180303
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