Bankers jailed, sued as Iceland seeks culprits for crisishttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4379020#4379696Such a reasonable country, rising up to its own self-defense. It's nice to think about the happy news in Iceland - I know it's all a daydream - in combination with this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/business/13street.html?hpProsecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies
By LOUISE STORY
Published: May 12, 2010
The New York attorney general has started an investigation of eight banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.
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The ratings agency scams go to the heart of the Wall Street housing bubble frauds. This is where the excuses and evasions end. Supposedly independent third-party auditors received billions of dollars from the issuers of junk securities to rate them AAA, without which investors would have never been duped into buying said junk.
To take one example, Moody's issued hundreds of AAAs on mortgage securities (like the famous Abacus fund put together by John Paulson and pimped by Goldman Sachs) that only months later were downgraded to junk. The difference is, they had already been sold to the suckers while still AAA. The "correction" came after the suckers were already screwed, and merely adds insult to injury.
The ratings agencies who posed as independent auditors of values committed frauds just as bad or worse than those perpetrated by Arthur Anderson on behalf of Enron.
Arthur Anderson was seized in the course of the criminal investigation of Enron. There was no need to be polite to them.
Of course, Wall Street saw to it at the end of the 20th century (thanks to Obama advisers Larry Summers and Robert Rubin alongside Phil Gramm and Greenspan) that Congress would make legal all the frauds it then perpetrated in the 21st century. However, the variety of fraud and conspiracy laws on the books gives a prosecutor a lot of leeway. Cuomo may not need to be limited to financial statutes. When businesses misrepresent their products to gain sales, they may make themselves liable under other existing fraud statutes.
I wonder about the applicability of the RICO criminal statutes. These are like turbo for prosecutors. They were invented specifically to get at gangsters who knew how to conceal their operational decision-making structures - just like the banksters knew to disperse apparent responsibility among many different parties, each in a different compartment, each able to claim they're "just doing their job." But again, the weak link in the bankster schemes is at the ratings agencies. This is where their fraud is most obviously exposed.
A lot of mobsters went down on a lot less evidence of conspiracy to defraud than is currently available for the banksters and the ratings agencies. This is not really about the law but about public and political attitudes and the will to act.
When the banksters are seen as having committed greater crimes with far, far greater damages to the public than anything the mafia ever did, then we may see some motion from the politicians. We may actually be close to that moment. I think it will come with the next crash - though unfortunately there is the risk that the next crash will instead bring a right-wing reaction in Tea Party style.
Of course, we've already seen Wall Street's true line of defense: fuck with us and we blow up the world. Drain your economy to guarantee our operations, or we blow up the world. It's hilarious that this country still runs on Terror War propaganda. Can you imagine a greater capitulation to terrorists than the government's series of surrenders to the bankster threats since 2008?
Hey, good news everyone:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/business/12bank.html?hp4 Big Banks Score Perfect 61-Day Run
By ERIC DASH
Published: May 11, 2010
It is the Wall Street equivalent of a perfect game of baseball — 27 up, 27 down, the final score measured in millions of dollars a day.
Despite the running unease in world markets, four giants of American finance managed to make money from trading every single day during the first three months of the year.
Their remarkable 61-day streak is one for the record books. Perfect trading quarters on Wall Street are about as rare as perfect games in Major League Baseball. On Sunday, Dallas Braden of the Oakland Athletics pitched what was only the 19th perfect game in baseball history.
But Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Company produced the equivalent of four perfect games during the first quarter. Each one finished the period without losing money for even one day.
Their showing, disclosed in quarterly financial filings, underscored the outsize — and controversial — role that trading has assumed at major financial institutions. It also drives home the widening lead that a handful of big banks are enjoying over lesser rivals on post-bailout Wall Street.
SNIP
That's why we fight! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
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