Now Let's Hold Hearings Into the People really Responsible For The Financial Crisis
Prosecutors haven't found wrongdoing [during the financial crash]
because, under the laws in effect at the time, there wasn't any
wrongdoing.
And that highlights the real crime here: The laws in effect at the time.
So it's time to call a few more people to the stand.
The folks who made the laws that allowed all this stuff [the financial
crash] to happen, for example. And the folks responsible for the
agencies that missed the only criminal behavior that has been found:
- The Senators who approved the lax "mark-to-market" accounting
rules (which allowed banks like Lehman to print huge phantom "profits"
for bonus and stock purposes, and then, on the way down, lie about the
value of their crap assets until they collapsed in a heap).
- The folks who championed all those neg-am option-ARM mortgages
(Alan Greenspan).
- The folks who decided Glass-Steagall was an unnecessary
anachronism (Greenspan, Bill Clinton, Bob Rubin, Sandy Weill).
- The people who decided derivatives shouldn't be regulated
(Greenspan, Rubin, Phil Gramm, Larry Summers, Enron).
- The man who ran the SEC while it whiffed on Madoff and
Stanford (Christopher Cox).
- The man who ran the SEC when it decided to eliminate leverage
rules, allowing the banks to gamble themselves into oblivion (Cox).
- The folks who got Fannie and Freddie into the sub-prime
business (Daniel Mudd, etc.).