Kaufman: Why has no banker gone to jail?
By Ted Kaufman - delawareonline
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The New York Times summed up the reaction of observers, saying “Still, some critics have questioned why the agency chose to make Mr. Tourre – a midlevel employee who was 28 at the time of the mortgage deal – the face of the crisis. Not one executive at Lehman Brothers, which filed Wall Street’s biggest bankruptcy ever at the height of the crisis, was charged with wrongdoing.”
Exactly. The questions I have been asking for years remain. Why has not one of the bank executives who were running the show even been indicted? Why has no one gone to jail?
In his closing arguments Mr. Martens came up with at least one possible answer to those questions. Mr. Touree, he said, was living in “a Goldman Sachs land of make-believe,” where deceiving investors is not fraudulent.
We have allowed Wall Street banks to operate in that land of make-believe for years. Over and over again, they get away with slap-on-the-wrist money penalties, fines often so small they seem to be regarded as a cost of doing business.
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1 COMMENTS:
Fore?
13 signs the Big Bank Conspiracy is a moral threat
Commentary: Goldman’s ‘soul sick’ pathology is spreading
Do you? Yes, Big Banks are morally blind, do not care what taxpayers, investors and politicians think ... Huffington Post says eight agencies are investigating J.P. Morgan for fraud, while CEO Jamie Dimon yawns ... billionaires are saving three times what they did in 2007, they see the crash coming ... Bill Gross says the 30-year bull in our $32 trillion bond market is over, “you’re going to lose money investing” ... Economist Robert Gordon warns that America’s GDP growth will be less than 1% by 2100.
But Big Banks have short-term brains. They only see the one rule of capitalism: Make profits. What about public interest? Not part of a corporation agenda. Not with CEOs like Dimon and Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, traders, executives and vice presidents who expect huge bonuses. Short-term profits always trump long-term public interests. Always.
Has Goldman’s moral pathology infected a Big Banks Conspiracy?
Let me remind you again of John C. Bogle’s great classic, “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Undermined Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions.” That was 2005, Vanguard’s founder warned us Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was no longer driving “capitalism in a healthy, positive direction.”
Bogle saw a “happy conspiracy” of Wall Street, Washington and Corporate America was spreading a “pathological mutation of capitalism” driven by the new “invisible hands” of this conspiracy pushing their selfish agenda in a war to control American democracy and capitalism. Goldman Sachs had a winning hand, and the competition wanted one too.
They won: Democracy is dead. Capitalism is dead. Our moral compass is broken. More proof? See for yourself the 13 signs of the “pathological mutation of capitalism” that Bogle fears. How it’s metasticized right under our noses. How Goldman’s pathogens spread so rapidly since the 2008 crash they are infecting every other Wall Street bank, plus the global Big Banks Conspiracy, the world’s top hundred banks?
You decide. See for yourself: Here are earlier news reports paraphrasing the 13 symptoms of a “soul sickness” pandemic spreading from Goldman Sachs’s pathology:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/13-signs-the-big-bank-conspiracy-is-a-moral-threat-2013-08-10?
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