If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Remember the final phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of America - "...justice for all"? Let the SEC go after businessmen, bankers, CEOs, CIOs, and others in positions of responsibility when fraud is uncovered at their organizations -- regardless of what they claim their "intentions" were.
Dodd-Frank is a lazy man's spray-gun approach at financial reform. There is simply a total lack of critical changes needed to fix the regulatory spinal cord of the financial markets -- and it's either the blind ignorance of systemic risk or an agenda as dark as you could imagine.
As Republicans gather in Tampa this week, they've got a bit of a problem: figuring out how to wine, dine, and celebrate their sugar daddies in style without ripping back the veil of secrecy they've drawn over their super-wealthy backers.
Making recommendations would give the SEC a second chance, but will not solve the stability problem if there aren't three commissioners who are willing to accept them.
The markets don't belong only to people like Mr. Joyce; they should and must belong as well to individual investors. Congress and the regulators must recognize that action is long overdue.
Just a decade ago, this nation began to dig itself out from the Enron fall-out. At the core of Enron and the impetus behind the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was the importance of knowing who's in charge and who's making the decisions.
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.
The parallels between what happened during the Great Depression and what is happening now are striking. You would think that we would learn from history and apply some of the solutions that worked before. You would be wrong.
Incredibly, even while we're still clawing our way out of the hole that Wall Street's greed put us in, there are some in Congress who are trying to rig the system in the financial industry's favor.
Just recently, Washington announced the creation of a "dream team" of financial regulators, called the Systemic Risk Council. Great idea, but here's a question: Why was the current chairwoman of the SEC, Mary Schapiro, not included?
The SEC's warning against using past performance is advice investors should take with a grain of salt.
Human activity is changing the climate, and the climate is changing the weather. Buckle up. It's going to be a wild ride. And virtually every business in every sector of the economy is vulnerable.
Sadly but fortunately, there has been enough fraud, insider trading and other white collar crime in the United States over the past few decades to enable the SEC to create templates for major types of crimes and to tag the telltale signs of those crimes.
Even though there is never a sure thing on Wall Street, many people thought this would be the exception. After all, it's Facebook we're talking about.
If Congress is truly serious about banking reform, it needs more than just well-intentioned laws: it also needs the right people to enforce those laws, it needs to give those people the resources they require to do their job properly, and it needs to pay them decently.
In the wake of Wall Street recklessness that caused economic collapse, Congress gave shareholders and citizens Dodd-Frank to help them constrain self-dealing corporate executives. The 99% Coalition and shareholders are working with those tools even as Republicans vow to take them away.
