How Deep is the Rot on Wall Street?

[Jefferson23]

Joseph Fichera's op-ed in the New York Times shows the full depravity of Wall Street's resistance to regulation, says white collar criminologist Professor William Black.

November 14, 2014

#t=0

snip* Bio

William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Transcript


PERIES: Bill, what are you blogging on this week?

BLACK: So Joseph Fichera is a head of a Wall Street advisory firm. And he's one of the sometimes good guys, that is, for example, warned about auction rate securities as a dangerous scam and criticized major investment banks for derivatives that they've sold to cities. So he's easily in the top 10 percent of the distribution of Wall Street CEOs. But even he--and that's sort of the point--has just come out on November 6 and said, we're treating Wall Street too harshly.

Now, Wall Street, as we've talked about, has zero convictions of any of the senior officers who actually led the fraud epidemics that caused the crisis. But that's not sufficiently weak for Fichera. He says that the Securities and Exchange Commission should not have the power to remove an investment bank's license to sell securities, for example, just because it's committed a massive fraud. Instead, frauds should have a schedule of points, like the Department of Motor Vehicles has in many states. And so for one active appraisal fraud that could actually be thousands of acts, maybe you'd get four points. And over the course of six years, if you've got--he doesn't give the number, but maybe 16 points, then and only then could your license be removed.

So this is the idea that fraud is really just like driving without your seatbelt. You know, there's no moral element at all to defrauding other people of tens of billions of dollars, and that you actually have a right if you're in finance (but only if you're in finance) to a certain number of felonies before anything can happen seriously. And he explicitly says that the Securities and Exchange Commission should have no power to remove your license if you've only committed one series of felonies. And remember, this series of felonies could be 10,000 people that you defrauded or indeed millions of people that you defrauded. But like every dog gets its bite, every corporation that issue securities would get its massive fraud. And if it didn't get caught again within the next six years, well, then, like DMV, your points would be eliminated and you could commit your new fraud with impunity.

On top of that, he says, well, you know, we really have to believe in this too-big-to-jail and too-big-to-sanction stuff for the Securities and Exchange Commission, 'cause he says that there's a real contradiction between the principles of financial regulation and the principles of justice. In other words, if we want to insist on justice, we're going to have bad regulation, because we're going [to sanction] big firms, and then those firms will fail, and therefore we'll have financial crises. And so the answer is to leave the frauds in power, and not only to not prosecute them, but to make it very, very hard to take any serious enforcement action against them as well.

remainder: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12646

[marmar]

1. K/R

[Autumn]

2. How deep? Fucking bone deep, all the way deep.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025776332

[Jefferson23]

3. I know, that is a catastrophe..thanks for the link, though. n/t

[BrotherIvan]

8. Perfectly stated

Bone fucking deep.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Holder and Lanny Breuer apparently agree with Fichera

Breuer was the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice,
and in several interviews, including one for Frontline's The Untouchables ( it's on YouTube)
he has a deer in the headlights glaze as he explains how very very difficult it is to actually prove the bank's fraud.
Which apparently was not that much of a problem for NY AG Eric Schneiderman who DID file charges.

Breuer was a lawyer for white collar defendants before he went to the DOJ, and after he left DOJ he went right back to the his old law firm, in a higher position, again serving big money big business defendants.
Small wonder he could not find any reason to prosecute his former clients while at DOJ.

[Jefferson23]

5. It's been devastating, all of it. n/t

[Snotcicles]

6. Until we get more Elizabeth Warren's it will stay that way. And I'm suspicious that the move

buy Harry Reid this week wasn't about keeping her close and reining her in.

[ReRe]

7. K&R

... How deep is the rot? Probably up about the eyeballs by now.

Thanks for William Black's words concerning Evil-is-good Wall Street "Advisory Firm Head" Joseph Fichera who says (whines) "Wall Street is judged too harshly!"

There's two sets of laws. The one's we live by, and the one's that Wall Street lives by (which are basically "anything goes.&quot They can lie, cheat and steal, but we can't. Got that?

[djean111]

9. How deep? All the way down to the ground, down to the bone. nt

[Martin Eden]

10. Gordon Gekko x 1,000

Greed is their God. Nothing else matters to these parasites.

And they have infiltrated the Democratic Party at the highest levels.

[Jefferson23]

11. Public funded elections, that is where we need to begin the fight.

Senator Dick Durbin famously said about Congress in 2009, the banks “frankly own the place.”

[Martin Eden]

12. We have to fix or democracy or nothing else will be fixed

That is my sig line, and also the fundamental necessity for progress.

[annabanana]

13. Anchored right into Manhattan's bedrock.

Straight into Earth' s molten core....