If you have a society where it becomes foolish not to steal, then only fools don’t steal, and that society has not much of a future. The bankruptcy examiner’s report on Lehman reveals the fraud behind too much that goes for business on Wall Street. The fact is nothing really is new, many of the transactions were exactly what Enron “innovated”, validated by a major accounting firm with the active collusion of Tim Geithner’s NY Fed.
The only question, when is someone going to jail? Begging the question, when is our government going to do something? Of course, when you have a Congress that has been bought and sold five times over, one shouldn’t hold their breath. Talk of financial reform out of the Congress makes health care reform look like Public Citizen good government. How can you have any take on financial reform when you have no idea about what occurred, well if you’re in Congress you let Wall Street write the laws, then you don’t have to know.
The Journal has a good piece on the scam, along with the FT. Yves Smith is on BNN here about Geithner NY Fed’s culpability. And Eliot Spitzer was on Dylan Ratigan here(tx zh):
Ratigan:
This report comes just short of suggesting this is by no means an accident but instead one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated by a group of people, and enabled by the US government.
Spitzer:
There is no doubt civil cases will be brought. We had a failure of CEO, the CFO, the accountants, and indeed the regulators, the Fed and the Treasury, that were inside these banks, and the question has to be asked: where were they.
The question to the former NY AG, who by the way was the only elected official in this whole damned country taking on the financial industry back when they were all being celebrated as masters of the universe, but the question, what about criminal cases? And remember fellow taxpayers, it’s all your money in the amount of trillions that that has been poured in to paper over the still existing mess, and if we don’t hold our government officials accountable, that pretty much makes us all unindicted co-conspirators to our own looting — Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey.
Cross-posted from Archein: Lehman as Enron 2.0
Archein