Wall Street : Reckless Endangerment

[Shireling]

Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon”

(Democracy Now!)

A prominent Wall Street analyst predicted this week that not a single top executive at Goldman Sachs will face criminal prosecution for the company’s role in causing the financial meltdown of 2008. “I think that there is a genuine sense out there that there are two sets of rules, one for big and powerful institutions that are deemed to be too politically interconnected or powerful to fail, and the rest of us, Main Street,” says our guest Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter who has written extensively on how the U.S. government has failed to prosecute any of the top figures who played a role in the economic crash. Morgenson and Joshua Rosner are co-authors of the new book "Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon".

(snip)

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Well, of course, not being a prosecutor, it’s very difficult for me to really understand what goes through their minds when they bring cases or investigate. But I think that there is a genuine sense out there that there are two sets of rules, one for big and powerful institutions that are deemed to be too politically interconnected or powerful to fail, and the rest of us, Main Street. And I think that feeds a—that’s a very pernicious view. And unfortunately, if you don’t have investigations and if you don’t have cases being brought, that view will continue. In the S&L crisis, for example, many, many people went to jail. High-level executives went to jail. CEOs went to jail. And to have a crisis that was this much larger than that one and to have no one go to jail is very troubling to a lot of people.

JOSHUA ROSNER: And part of that really is—you know, to reiterate what Gretchen said—this view that if we really investigate, if we really find wrongdoing by senior executives at these firms who now are too big to fail, we’re going to risk destabilizing the system. That’s really the psyche.

AMY GOODMAN: And how much of it is—well, for example, President Obama will be raising—hopes to raise more than a billion dollars for the 2012 election cycle to become president again. And the people he surrounds himself by, the very people involved in 2008 in the financial meltdown.


http://democracynow.org/2011/6/2/reckless_endangerment_how

(scroll down to read entire interview)

[xchrom]

1. recommend