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Credit Suisse Traders Manipulated IT Systems To Hide $500m Losses
New submitter Qedward writes with a snippet from ComputerWorld UK: "Two traders at Credit Suisse have pleaded guilty to wire fraud and falsifying data after authorities said they had manipulated the bank's record systems, as the credit crunch approached, in order to help conceal over half a billion dollars' worth of losses. The traders admitted to circumventing a mandatory real time reporting system introduced by Credit Suisse, manually entering false profit and loss (P&L) figures as the products they handled collapsed in value. They did so, according to the accusations, under heavy pressure from their manager, who has also been charged."
I don't think putting incorrect data into the software can really count as manipulating the IT system.
Even banking systems have to obey the cardinal rule: Garbage in, Garbage out.
We only need protections against force and fraud. This is clearly fraud and would be punished even under the most libertarian business policies.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You have to actually fund regulatory agencies to notice this kind of behavior.
Revenge can be sweet, but if your objective is deterrence, forget about the death penalty. There's plenty of evidence that it's ineffective. Understandably, most of that evidence looks specifically at homocide rates (not many countries impose the death penalty for wire fraud at the moment).
Your argument assumes that bank employees do what is good for the bank. The last fnancial crisis has showed that this is simply not true. The excessive compensation schemes put in place at banks have disconnected what is good for employees from what is good for banks.
Huge bonuses were obtained by employees for deals that were very bad for the banks. Enough money to retire was paid in bonuses in a couple of years, so why would those employees care about the long-term health of the bank? External market pressures won't change that dynamic -- banks have to reform their compensation schemes.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!