Let us assume that the Justice Department vastly would have preferred to prosecute Goldman Sachs for its shady dealings in peddling toxic mortgages during the real estate boom, rather than put out the statement it issued late Thursday saying in essence, "Never mind, and enjoy the Hamptons."
Let us assume this, because the visuals of not prosecuting are bad for nearly everyone involved. The failure to prosecute enhances the public perception that ordinary people got screwed during the real estate bubble, while savvy Wall Street executives loaded money bags onto private jets and decamped to comfortable islands.
Had prosecutors at Justice been able to make a good case -- a case likely to put some Goldman people behind bars -- they would have done so, because the deterrent effect of American law enforcement in the next financial orgy that inevitably lies ahead is looking mighty weak. A prominent win for the prosecutors might have helped.
The same logic explains more broadly why nearly all of the seamy characters who profited while bludgeoning taxpayers, working people, retirees and homeowners have gotten away scot-free: The prosecutors can't muster cases with a good enough chance at winning.
All of which means there is something seriously amiss with the laws and regulations that allowed the financial crisis to build to such proportions. The fact that Goldman will walk away without incident -- unless you count the piddly settlement with the SEC -- has occasioned predictable hand-wringing about the supposed timidity of the government's cops on the beat. But the problem here is not the prosecutors: It is the rules under which they are working. It is the regulatory abdication that enabled a predatory mindset to capture American finance.
The bad guys have gotten away with bad deeds because the bad deeds were mostly legal, or at least sufficiently ambiguous in the light of the law to embolden institutions wealthy enough to employ empires' worth of lawyers to try their luck. The game was rigged in their favor. It was, 'Heads we win, tails the taxpayer loses -- and if the cops show up to bust the game, we grab the cash and ride free long before they nab us, leaving behind a trail of indecipherable ledger books.'
The Clinton administration failed the American public, led by two Treasury Secretaries, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, who ensured that derivatives gambling could expand exponentially without regulation, manipulating Congress into going along.
Fannie and Freddie failed by buying up predatory mortgages while fattening their own executives, ensuring that the housing Ponzi scheme could continue -- again with a huge congressional assist.
The George W. Bush administration failed, in spreading the gospel of unregulated markets and encouraging Wall Street to speculate recklessly without fear of scrutiny.
The Federal Reserve failed, led by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, by neglecting to police the predatory lending that became the dominant mode of mortgage markets and then assuring everyone that all would be fine.
The Obama administration merely inherited this mess, but it failed to use the cleanup as an opportunity to change the fundamental conditions of finance, and administered the second half of taxpayer-financed bailouts without imposing better rules.
Most of us are, one way or another, still paying for these disastrous failings. We are confronting a chronically weak job market, a foreclosure crisis without end and the loss of government services in the face of budgetary cutbacks. Older workers are postponing retirement because their savings have been whacked. College graduates can't pay back their student loans. The wisest people know well that we are just as vulnerable to another crisis as we were in the run-up to the last one.
Nothing of great consequence has changed.
When the government finally put Bernie Madoff in prison, there was a kind of public exultation, because here was a face we could blame for our troubles. So many people had lost so much wealth, and the explanations all seemed so inscrutable: low interest rates, derelict credit rating agencies, credit default swaps, global savings imbalances. It was all so confusing, given such an unsatisfying account of where all the money went, and here was a simple answer: That guy took it. Madoff had carted away people's savings in brazen violation of the law and common decency.
But his odious acts will go down in history as a rounding error in the context of the financial misdeeds that were legal, or close enough to legal to make prosecution unlikely. Maybe the next person who contemplates running a Ponzi scheme will pause in light of Bernie Madoff's current address, but the fundamental workings of high finance have hardy been altered.
A few arrogant Goldman people moving from their estates in Connecticut to one or another penitentiary might have improved the optics for those who find consolation in vengeance, an understandable urge in light of what has gone down. But it, too, would not have changed much. It would not have created jobs or kept any families in their homes or reshaped the basic state of play.
Ripping people off on a grand scale has become an intrinsic part of the contemporary business model on Wall Street. Changing that requires more than some people walking in front of TV cameras in handcuffs. It necessitates a rewriting of the rules and a willingness on the part of regulators to intervene long before the miscreants get out of hand.
Follow Peter S. Goodman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/petersgoodman
1) A sense that someone, somewhere in position of authority is fighting the good fight. That is VERY important in a very corrupt environment like we have today.
2) It would make Wall Street execs sweat bullets! Seeing the inside of a courtroom where you are alone, forced to answer very pointed and aggressive questions in a public venue can be a very traumatizing experience for gigantic egos used to be surrounded by legions of yes men. Plus, the very notion of going to trial inject a HUGE dose of uncertainty in the outcome.
3) Once an investigation goes to open court, the aura of invincibility of the Big Bankers is GONE!! No one fear them anymore. With fear gone...people talk! They can tell some very interesting stories if you know what I mean.
They starve people to death by the millions. 2008 was the year of the largest wheat production in 100 years. Low wheat prices are a good thing for people of the world as it means a year in which fewer of them will starve than usual. However, in spite of the fact that 2008 was the year of the largest wheat production in 100 year, millions more than normal died of starvation--most of them children. WHY?
Well, you can blame those deaths on Lloyd Blankfein and his commodity traders. They bought and bought wheat that year and did not sell in order to remove a large quantity of wheat from the market and drive the price up. They did their job so well that millions more than normal that year could not afford to buy their daily bread and so they starved to death. Where is their Nuremberg? v
At the end of 2008 the surplus wheat that Goldman Sachs had purchased and horded to drive up the prices was sold to corporate livestock farms. Sickening, isn't it? Bernie Madoff is in jail, but Lloyd Blankfein should be tried for crimes agains humanity and suffer the same fate as Adolf Eichmann.
Read THE FOOD BUBBLE How Wall Street Starved Millions and go away with it by Frederick Kaufman. It appeared in the July 2009 issue of Harpers.
Libor rate manipulation in absolutely illegal.
We can just start with those two.
So, pray tell how Republicans could do worse?
Remember that this question is from someone who has practically nothing good to say about the actual Republican Party.
not a bad taxplan from the GOP
From over 4 decades inside the securities business I know what so many do not know from the outside, including the media. David Satterfield, the former business editor of the Miami Herald and 2 times Pulitzer Prize-winner wrote the foreword and further endorsed Swindled -- from the back cover:
“With keen intellect and searing wit, Henry Schoenberger’s How We Got Swindled exposes the myriad of financial hijinks and colossal leadership failures that have turned the first decade of the new century into an economic disaster. Schoenberger not only identifies the causes, rationales and human failings that led to this mess; he provides some ready answers for how we must go about fixing it. This should be must-reading for every policy maker in Washington and every student of economics and finance.”
- David Satterfield, former Business Editor of the Miami Herald, 2 times Pulitzer Prize Winner
To be better informed: www.howwegotswindled.com
This IS what the GOP wants all along.
Unless the prosecutors are bought and payed for, I don't get it.
The B/C admin barrowed all the money from China and did not funding one spending bill for the war in Iraq...a country that did not do one thing to the United States....but they did not stop there...no no...they also did not fund one dime of the spending for the war in Afghan....no..no again they barrowed the money from CHINA....just as they did with their super big tax cut......again by barrowing all the money from CHINA....NET RESULT they created the largest debt in the history of the world...and because it continues through 2012, it is still the "gift that keeps on giving"......
THANKS BUSH/CHENEY FOR THE UNFUNDED WARS AND UNFUNDED TAX CUTS...and the LARGEST DEBT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD...
Just because prosecuters could not make their case doesn't mean this wasn't criminal.
Let's see. Profits from ripping off mortgage buyers is not only legal, its pretty close to being tax free as I speak. Sure, there's weaknesses in the laws on this subject, but the Republicans are doing everything in their power to make sure these weakness continue to exist. Just like Romney ripping off the corporations after he buys them and before he drives them into bankruptcy, what Goldman is doing is legal and therefore credible. Goldman is doing what every Republican US Congressman thinks is good and just.
I just have one thing to say to the prosecutors: Aren't mortgages a contract; and if so, then isn't there a 'good faith' element in every contract?
Oh, I can feel it trickling down already...