Against Wall Street Greed, Prosecutors Are Striking Out

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Against Wall Street,
Prosecutors Are Striking Out
Unfortunately, lawmakers aren't doing too well either — and the big bank bonus grab has once again shifted into overdrive.

November 16, 2009
By Sam Pizzigati


The bankers at Goldman Sachs, Goldman's CEO pronounced last week, are doing “God’s work.” God, these days, must truly be working in strange ways. Take what happened a few short years ago, right before the bubble burst on the market for subprime-backed securities.

The power suits at Goldman Sachs saw that pop coming. Late in 2006, expecting the worse, they began “selling off” their own inventory of subprime securities and, as the McClatchy newspapers detailed earlier this month, betting against subprimes “in secretive swaps markets.”

Meanwhile, at the same time, Goldman Sachs insiders merrily continued to collect huge fees helping their clients buy up the same subprime paper the insiders knew had no future.

The chair of the theology department at your local university might not consider this sort of duplicitous behavior “God’s work.” Professors at your local law school might even wonder whether behavior this brazen qualifies as criminal.

Last week, in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn, jurors gave Wall Streeters worried about their potential criminal liability some most welcome news. They acquitted two hedge fund managers at the failed Lehman Brothers banking empire on charges they had defrauded their clients — by encouraging them to keep their money in a fund the traders knew to be stuffed with junk securities. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/nov16a.html