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."

Comments

Re:News for Nerds??!!

[Sarten-X]

Now if only that were part of the story, then it'd be suitable for placement here (though it could be in TFA, which of course I haven't read, in which case the summary is off-topic).

This story is just for invoking the rage of Slashdotters, as so many stories of late (by which I mean the past few years, at least) are. Nerds are, on the whole, highly-intelligent idealists. We love to tell others how things should be done, especially when they're outside the field of technology, so we don't have to worry about other perspectives. Add to that the hatred of the rich and distrust of banks, with a bit of conspiracy theory for flavor, and you have a perfect recipe for a sensational Slashdot story.

Nobody's surprised that bankers screwed up. They took their bad securities, mixed them together with securities that other banks said were good, then sold the whole thing saying it's good... only for others to mix in their own bad securities and reiterate. Some noticed, some didn't, and some noticed but didn't want to do anything about it. That sucks.

Meanwhile, IT admins around the world are requiring weak passwords, moving vital data to cloud services without backups, and putting servers under water lines. We all do things to make the world worse, but for now it's just the bankers who are presented as evil for it.