Bankers love to recount the fabled story of the invisible hand. In their version, the superhero Invisible Hand effectively controls the market, thoroughly trust-busting and fraud-forestalling. Everyone lives happily ever after.
Truth be told, however, the tale of the invisible hand is a horror story. The invisible hand fails miserably to constrain bankster racketeering. It didn't prevent the market crash in 2008. The ending to that sad saga is recession.
Expecting an invisible hand to control the market is believing in fantasy. It is depending on the ethereal digits of Casper the Friendly Ghost to stop bid-rigging, price-fixing, self-dealing banksters. Casper's airy little fist packed no wallop when it came to impeding high-risk betting on Wall Street, the LIBOR lending rate manipulation or the disappearance of client money at MFGlobal. There's a much better way than Casper to catch a bankster: pay them to turn each other in.
Like delinquent children, bankers chafed under the restraints placed on them after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Their lobbying chipped away at the regulations until 1999 when they achieved repeal of the most important one, the Glass-Steagall Act.
Within a decade, the market crashed again. Investigators discovered banks had packaged bad loans into securities and pawned them off to unwitting investors. That's one of the same practices uncovered by a Depression-era inquiry into the 1929 Crash.
This spring, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman Sachs for its version of that scam. Here is how the SEC explained the ABACUS case:
Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party.
But, hey, they don't need no regulation, right?
Banks have now been sued for their bad behavior on both ends of the mortgage crisis. A U.S. attorney has accused Deutsche Bank of making federally insured mortgage loans without checking, as required and as it claimed it had, on whether borrowers had jobs, savings or any way to repay. The failure of such loans contributed significantly to the crisis.
After no-income-no-asset loans went bad, banks tried to foreclose to get their money back. Many engaged in illegal robo-signing of foreclosure documents and now face lawsuits from defrauded homeowners and municipalities.
But, hey, they don't need no regulation, right?
Last October, commodities brokerage MFGlobal went bankrupt with $1.6 billion missing from client accounts. It is accused of wrongly using customer funds to cover capital shortages. As a criminal investigation ensued, bankers described this as a fluke and said it couldn't happen again.
In fact, shortly afterward a similar fund, PFGBest, posted a note on its website assuring investors it observed all regulations and didn't co-mingle funds.
And then it happened again. Just last week, PFGBest filed for bankruptcy. The same day, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged the firm with fraud and reported $215 million in client money missing.
But, hey, they don't need no regulation, right?
That's what Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has said repeatedly since the crash. In fact, Dimon described the arguments that too-big-to-fail banks must be regulated as "infantile" and "nonfactual." And then his bank lost billions. Billions. Well, at first Jamie said it was only $2 billion. He dismissed concerns about it as a "tempest in a teapot."
But then the tempest got really big, like hurricane size. On Friday, Jamie admitted the loss had nearly tripled to $5.8 billion and could rise another $1.7 billion.
Whoops. But hey, Jamie don't need no infantile regulation, right?
Then there is the LIBOR price fixing case as well as the bank bid-rigging convictions just secured by a prosecutor in Manhattan. In LIBOR, Barclays Bank paid $450 million in a plea settlement for manipulating LIBOR, the benchmark for countless interest rate determinations worldwide, including those on savings accounts and mortgage loans.
Barclays' juvenile-sounding defense was this: everybody was doing it. The U.S. Justice Department's deal with Barclays suggests the bank is cooperating in the investigation of everybody else -- which would be the dozen other banks that participate in setting the LIBOR rate, including none other than Jamie's JPMorgan.
In the Manhattan case, a jury convicted three employees of GE Capital in a decade-long interest rate bid rigging scam that skimmed billions from the coffers of cities and towns. Also involved were virtually every major bank on Wall Street, including Jamie's JPMorgan.
But, hey, they don't need no regulation. There's Casper the Friendly Ghost's invisible hand, right?
Earlier this month, a survey of 500 American and British financial services executives found that a quarter of them had seen wrongdoing in the workplace and believed it was essential to success. But here's the most important figure: 94 percent said they'd report wrongdoing if shielded from reprisal and guaranteed financial rewards.
It's simple: Show them the money. For cash, all honor among thieves vanishes like Casper.
They do need regulation. But in addition, regulators should be equipped with even bigger bribes than they've got now to encourage banksters to rat each other out.
Follow Leo W. Gerard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uswblogger
Why did he do it?
And what makkes you think paying bankers to expose bakers would work? They already pay each other vast amounts to keep the rotten system going, why would they stop the never ending honey pot Mr Gerard?
But like a few editorials here on huffington post rightfully pointed out, we need a more strict approach ad prosecution of the perpetrators of our financial system and financial security. They are cleaning us out, and all we do is bend over...
Our governments need to act like the institutions we erected them for: protect their people from the power of the few, regulate and correct mistakes with a firm hand and take control back.
I know I will vote for the party here in Holland that stands for these ethically and socially required changes in order to build a better world where the power of the few no longer determine our prosperity. Regulate, now!
The benefits of the invisible hand occur in a relatively FREE market, not in a market manipulated by government-granted monopolies. So to say the invisible hand didn't prevent the market crash in 2008, of course it didn't. The invisible hand has been locked away for a century, replaced by the "coercive fist".
The idea of the "coercive fist" is to artificially push towards desired outcomes without any regard for natural market forces or economic laws. The desired outcomes, when they do come (in the form of bubbles), are them followed by the undesired consequences (in the form of busts). The invisible hand didn't create this desperate need for regulation - the regulators did!
It's also been said that he engaged in questionable activities in lowering his total tax liability - those questions coming from members of the Senate who know these 'dark' methods of reducing tax liability.
Now, suppose that within the last five tax returns, on income of $-millions, he owed and paid zero tax.
He would likely lose the election on this fact alone, since, regardless of whether it was entirely legal (read laws purchased by the wealthy for the purpose of avoiding tax altogether) because the American people may be gullible, but they are not total fools.
It's now becoming widely known how unfair everything is. The rich have purchased the where-with-all through our 'purchased and influenced' legislative branch to, effectively, take more and more and leave less and less for everyone else.
If the 'poor shall inherit the earth' (biblical) - it shall be a denuded earth from which all was taken from below and above ground by the rich who took it all.
Well, I guess you are smarter than the great FDR who though Glass-Steagall would regulate the system.
And, of course, since it did, I guess it wasn't FDR who was the fool.
“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” ~FDR
But we know today's unions no longer fight.
A new definition to me.
The case you are talking about involves victims across the spectrum of U.S. citizenship and should be filed by the U.S. Attorney.
The union won't even back a Constitutional amendment to protect collective bargaining rights.
If you want to argue that somebody else is responsible when your own house is under attack, fine. But my grandfather, a union organizer in the 20's and 30's, would have called that cowardice.
DEFEND YOUR HOUSE!
Funny, that's exactly how long the pseudo-regulatory body of the Fed has been around. The Fed, while nominally run by government, is in truth run by bankers. So yes, when you grant an industry the power to regulate itself, and give them access to the monopoly power of coercive government force to carry out their "regulatory" actions, you can expect bad results. What good is even heavier regulation when all along they themselves have been accountable to nobody but... they themselves!
That's fair!
http://www.prisonexp.org/
The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment
"Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment web site, which features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.
How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of human nature.
--Philip G. Zimbardo"
At least the Democrats did pass Dodd-Frank and propose the Volcker Rule. Yes, it is woefully insufficient, but at least it was a start. The albatross counter-weight, the GOP doesn't want ANY regulation. This pulls all discussions to the right. Imagine if a party existed on the left of the Democrats insisting on Glass-Stegall. We would probably have reinstated it.
This is not to say the Democrats deserve a free pass, but their is a massive, stark contrast between the two parties. If Democrats regained a massive majority, say 70 senators with an extra 5 true progressives, I am sure there would be discussion of Glass-Stegall. 59 Dems, including a handful of DINOs, are not going to get the job done. But this is no excuse to say "they are both the same so I am going to just vote for Romney because he isn't Obama".
Very sad rationale that uses no logic or deductive reasoning.
But I'm still going to vote for the best option to save America - Obama/Biden 2012
Dodd-Frank was the same: written by Barney & Sen. Dodd (D-Countrywide), it was so weak to begin with that no one really cared when they gutted it and delayed its implementation until the cows come home.
Republicans are awful (and worse), but at least they do what they say they're gonna do.
I'm not saying Obama ever did have the intention of passing it, but I think if he insisted on it, he would have failed and then got routed even worse in 2010 (if that is possible).