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tillie the turtle, on an egg-laying mission, is no match in size or speed for a speedy (15mph, with the wind) ashland railway locomotive.
unfortunately, the u.s. justice department is even more overmatched in it's half hearted struggle against rampant wall street crime.
beginning of my bill black notes.
"the dogs that aren't barking................
nobody at the regulatory agencies will even make a criminal referral on ANYBODY that commits an elite crime.
the fha, of all things, finally did an audit and stated that foreclosure fraud stuff was real.
HELLO-you and i knew that stuff 5 years ago, but they did state that it was endemic?
without the regulatory agencies making criminal referrals, the fbi and justice departments have no criminal cases to pursue.
what we have in the economic business now is an application of gresham's dynamic, where bad ethics drive good ethics out of the marketplace.
for example, if the head of fannie mae(cfo) cheats, he gets his bonus and his ceo gets a bonus.
if a cfo doesnt cheat for big bucks, his ceo wont get big bucks, and mr. cfo will be gone, maybe after 3 months..
cfos of big firms now last an average of years.
why does the stock market crush firms that miss the number by as little as a penny?
it now believes that no one would miss by a penny, if they had any other choice.
the regulators get so in bed with the people they are regulating that they insulate them from the regulatory system.
on an average year, goldman sachs wins 30 of 31 trading days.
how is this possible?
they front run everything, including their own customers, by trading against them.
the sec does useless consent decrees in which nobody admits anything.
even if they pay a fine, none of the evidence or judgment can be used by you or me in court to claim damages.
consent decrees are useless, and set no regulatory precident or enforcement actions.
there is no evidence that this sec will ever make real enforcement actions.
where are the prosecutors?
in the savings and loan debacle 25 years ago, the government made 10,000 criminal referrals as a regulatory agency.
a top 100 priority list was created, for the worst offendors.
there were over 1,000 felony convictions in what were designated as major cases.
let's roll the tape forward.
the fbi warned, in 2004, in open testimony in the u.s. house, that there was an 'epidemic of mortgage fraud' in their words, and that 'crisis' was near, unless the fraud was stopped.
the office of thrift supervision, which during the aforementioned savings and loan crisis made exactly 0 referrals in this crisis.
they didn't regulate wamu, indymac, countrywide, or...............
in defense of the justice department, when 911 hit and we figured we couldn't infiltrate al quaida, 500 agents were transferred from the white collar section to national security, and we understand why.
what is not understandable is why the bush administration refused to authorize the fbi to replace the lost agents.
in 2001, 5 weeks later, enron went down.
in 2002, there were several big telecom failures(worldcom).
$7 billion in market cap had disappeared.
it takes 2 to 4 years on these big cases to prosecute.
they put 100 fbi agents on the enron case.
there were 1,000 fbi agents working on the savings and loan cases.
the current crisis is roughly 40 times bigger in size.
as late as 2008, there were 120 fbi agents working on fraud nationwide.
the were 120 agents to deal with one million cases of mortgage fraud a year.
what are 120 agents going to do spread over 56 field offices?
there is no manpower to investigate anything serious.
all they can do is the little stuff.
what is the chance that a perpetrator of big time fraud will be caught?
the chances are effectively 0.
if they can clear 1000 to 2000 cases each year, and there are a million ...........you get the picture.
you might as well be throwing beach sand in the ocean, while planning a walk to hawaii.
it's utterly useless.
the fbi, in 2008, figured these plans were nuts, and created a plan to allocate resources to look at the big lenders who did the fraudulent loans.
bush's attorney general killed the plan, and stupidly refused to create a national task force to go after the mortgage fraud, calling it "little white collar street crime."
he assigned his agents to only look at piddly stuff."
end of bill black notes
is the current administration, in it's 'adamant' pursuit against white collar crime adding agents or stepping up the pace?
above from my notes of recent remarks by bill black:
aloc note: there are currently 261 fbi agents working white collar crime, an outgunned army, for sure.
i bet on the turtle every time.
Bill Black is currently an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007 and previously taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and at Santa Clara University.
Black was litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) from 1984 to 1986, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) in 1987, and Senior VP and the General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco from 1987 to 1989, which regulated some of the largest thrift banks in the U.S.[2]
[edit]Savings and Loan Scandal
Black was a central figure in exposing Congressional corruption during the Savings and Loan Crisis. He took the notes during the Keating Five meeting that were later published in the press, and brought the event to national attention and a congressional investigation.
According to Bill Moyers,
"The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course."[3]
i bet on the turtle every time.
tchaikovsky 6
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