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al Street criminals, Charles Ferguson, Financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, Heist of the century, JPMorganChase, Morgan Stanley, Predator Nation, r, Wall Street criminality
It’s been a staple of the blogosphere since the Credit Crunch in 2008 that the Banks were complicit in the downfall of Western economies. Many voices were heard repeating the old adage that only amateurs rob banks – professional thieves own them.
Now slowly their voices are coming mainstream, and Charles Ferguson, author of “Predator Nation” writes today for the Guardian, a slightly left of centre British daily paper. In his piece “Heist of the Century: Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis” he claims that far from walking foolish and blindfolded over the cliff all Street knew fine well about the bubble and contrived to make a killing at the expense of the ordinary man and woman in the street. This was not foolishness, it was wanton criminality, pure and simple. He is startlingly blunt. He calls out Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley as particularly egregious. Here is a flavour of the piece.
“It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.
This behaviour is criminal. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in major financial frauds and in concealment of criminal assets; and committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression.
And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way.”
They’d better hurry up as the time limits for taking these cases to court are very short! What I would love to learn is the linkages between those in financial positions and our politicians. His book Predator Nation is out this week.
You can read the full article here.
Copyright David Macadam 2012
Harry Markopolos, a financial analyst who repeatedly tried to warn the SEC about Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme — and who, like Leyla Wydler, was persistently ignored — has said the law “reads as if it were a wish list from those who once designed the Enron, Madoff, Global Crossing, Stanford, and WorldCom frauds.” Evidently, that only proved an incentive for the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets to approve Grimm’s measure in December 2011, on a party-line vote, which means it could now be tacked onto some must-pass piece of legislation and enacted.
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