Slashdot Mirror
Email Trails Show Bankers Behaving Badly
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is running a pair of stories about U.S. financial institutions being investigated by the Federal government and courts for alleged systemic and illegal activities that helped bring about the housing crisis and collapse of the world economy in 2008. Emails produced during courtroom discovery reveal that insiders at JP Morgan Chase knew that the bundles of securities they were marketing to investors were rotten with bad loans. And emails show the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's (a division of McGraw-Hill) was determined to stop losing deals to its competitors by being too tough on the banks whose products they were evaluating."
And I wouldn't blame a few individual bankers, I think this was coordinated a bit higher up. American banks had been selling way too many loans, and when they saw this was becoming a huge problem that might bring down the entire American economy, they made the brilliant move of packaging these loans in nice AAA investment vehicles and selling them to the rest of the world. Now it became a global crisis instead of an American one.
Not a very moral or honest thing to do, but it sure was ingenious.
"...anybody who wants to see anything different has got to tell me how we de-centralize."
It's starting, and slowly gaining momentum. Support any efforts in your state or local government to re-assert sovereignty. CO and WA are actively defying federal drug laws. Twenty six states sued to block Obamacare and many governors are actively resisting its implementation. Several states have passed resolutions asserting that the NDAA won't be enforced in their states. With all of the anti-gun hysteria, we're seeing states and even county LEOs claiming that they will stop any new gun control laws being forced on their citizens. Something really interesting is that several county LEOs are claiming that they will actively thwart federal LEOs from enforcing the laws in their jurisdictions.
Maybe if we could elect some courageous state AGs, they could prosecute these banking slime on charges of fraud, forgery, perjury, etc.
I like the idea of state banks. Until fractional reserve banking is banned, I think that's the best way to restore the money power to the people.
F*** the federal government's "oversight" role. They have the FDIC, OTS, OCC, SEC, FBI, CFTC, etc. etc. and they not only failed to stop the Wall St. fraud factory and thwarted any investigation and prosecution, they actively conspired to facilitate and cover up the frauds. There is little hope of positive change at the federal level.
Let's remember, these "smoking gun" emails are the result of exhaustive, comprehensive searches of EVERY ingoing and outgoing email from the respective organizations. In a large enough company I can guarantee you I can find emails that "prove" almost anything relating to thier business, their customers, etc.
That some employees expressed doubts or questioned the value of the products or services their company offers means very little if they are not the decision-makers.
Anyone surprised that a salesman at an investment house might be selling something they either don't understand or personally see the value in shouldn't be investing in the stock market. Would you be surprised to find out the guy selling you a Chevy Volt doesn't believe it is the best car in the world? What a salesman says to a customer is not neccessarily what he believes in his heart or in his mind.
Ken
Would never pass congress, those loopholes are important to ensure the regulation doesn't stop people from making tons of money from committing fraudulent acts, err rather, those loopholes ensure the country's economy doesn't slow.
...the trick I guess is that one of the economies has a monomorphic (or more truly catamorphic) relationship to the other one, where we need it to be homomorphic...hylomorphic might also be workable...
In all honesty, I have just realized a simple fact, America is a country with 2 economies. The rich people's economy and everybody elses, they follow 100% different rules, their money comes from 100% different sources, they are literally 2 distinct economies. The only way they intermix is that the rich one get's all it's money through tricking and extorting the money from the other one (and others, internationally), and the other one generates money for itself by internally ebbing the money about as well as importing money from other countries through valuable exports. The country's GDP comes from everyone's, however the country's GDP goes to the rich people's.
Viewing them as two totally separate and distinct economies the same way you view america's economy and mexico's economy actually makes a lot more sense...