If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
What does "evidence of a major digital attack looming" look like? There are no convoys to see from a spy plane, no fleet heading sailing towards Hawaii. Without an idea of what this evidence is, the guidelines seem to justify preemptive attacks against just about anyone at any time.
When what you do is make money from money, it seems as if breaking or avoiding laws and rules create victimless crimes. It's all a big game, where each person is trying to out-hustle the other. It's him or me so what does it matter if we both cheat a bit?
That regulators condone the continued use of VAR models and get pushed around on tougher capital and liquidity limits can only mean one thing: they have concluded that it's simply too dangerous to the system to reveal that the emperor has no clothes.
Where is Phil Gramm hiding? The former Republican senator from Texas has not been heard from since his bank got nailed by the G-men. Or, as the Times put it, UBS now has the distinction of being "the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud."
It's a good thing we have all decided not to care about the Libor scandal, or Tim Geithner might be looking kind of silly right now.
To my knowledge, no one has taken a look at the symptomatology leading up to the 2008 crash from the perspective of Wall Street's prevailing corporate culture, with the insights only these two authors can provide.
We just keep learning new ways that everybody on earth, aside from Tim Geithner, knew of the risk of Libor manipulation years and years ago.
One of Mitt Romney's biggest bundlers makes money representing predatory lenders and fraudulent mortgage servicers who want to prevent Congress from curtailing their corrupt practices. What would Romney do?
Instead of raising fares and proposing to charge riders a fee when they have to purchase a new Metro Card, the MTA should be looking to recoup millions of dollars that the big banks may have improperly charged them.
The biggest financial scandal in history has gotten all of zero minutes' air time on the ABC and NBC nightly news broadcasts and only a little more time than that on CBS and the major cable news channels.
Despite widespread crime of various types across all classes of society, most Americans polled were comfortable trusting their own "moral compass." Let's see how we did with that in July.
Poor London. They may have the Olympics, but the recent LIBOR scandal appears to be strike three in a ballgame full of regulatory gaffes that have left the city's reputation for governance tarnished in the eyes of the world's financial elite.
Tim Geithner claims he learned of Libor manipulation when the rest of us commoners did, in 2008. New evidence keeps coming out suggesting he should have known much, much earlier.
Namely, duty to market is the foundation of a well-functioning market. Only when combined with supervision, regulation, and codes of conduct stressing trust and personal integrity, can systemic failure, fraudulent practices, and rate manipulation be curtailed.
We're screwed. That's as good a place to start this post as any. Congress and the Administration have been co-opted -- bought and paid for. Financial regulation is a joke and fraud is a business model and seen as standard operating procedure.
