Immune and all-powerful

from Le Monde:



Immune and all-powerful
by Serge Halimi


The International Monetary Fund has just admitted that “nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, confidence in the stability of the banking system as a whole has yet to be fully restored” (1). US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke described it as “the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression” (2), but no one in the US has been charged with any crime. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J P Morgan all stood to gain by the collapse of the high-risk investments they warmly recommended to their clients. They got off with a fine at worst; more often they got a bonus.

Eight hundred bankers were prosecuted and jailed after the fraud-related US Savings and Loans failures in the late 1980s. Now the power of the banks, increased and concentrated by restructuring, is so great that they seem immune to prosecution in any state impeded by public debt. Future White House candidates, including Barack Obama, are already begging Goldman Sachs to fund their election campaigns; the head of BNP Paribas has threatened European governments with a credit squeeze if they make any serious attempt to regulate the banks; Standard & Poor’s, the agency that awarded its highest rating of AAA to Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and many junk bonds, plans to downgrade the US rating if Washington fails to deliver public spending cuts. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://mondediplo.com/2011/05/01crisis

Unless we want borrowers, loan officers and foreclosure clerks in jail, I'm not sure who is realistically jailable.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Being accused of bribery.

"Jefferson County Sewer Authority financing"

There's a Google search that will turn up plenty of interesting stuff.

The problem isn't that there isn't anything to nail these guys on. The problem is that there is SO MUCH that they can be nailed on and there is not a damn think anyone in the administration is willing to do about it. Conspiracy, fraud, false advertising, embezzlement, bribery and more, the list of crimes committed is enormous.

But Eric Holder has better things to do, like intimidating medical marijuana dispensaries. And so the bankers go free, as the statute of limitations goes "tick, tick, tick..."

By this point, there exists mountains of evidence that the banks who created mortgage-backed securities were lying to investors to push the deals through. Our government refuses to prosecute because they chose early on to prop up these failed banks at all costs, and any legal action would threaten to plunge banks right back into transparent insolvency.

Make no mistake, this was a political decision by the Obama administration.