On 1/29/2013 11:38 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
So where are all the arrests and convictions for the mortgage games and other Wall Street malfeasance that led to the financial crisis of 2008? Seems that was a tad more egregious than anything Enron did, so there should have been more arrests and convictions?
Not everyone gets caught. But across the board, corrupt private businesses get caught & pay a price and/or disappear ...far more often than corrupt government entities. But even with the financial crisis of 2008, there was SOME reckoning. Bernie Madoff is in jail. Lots of CEOs lost their jobs. Boards of Fortune 500 companies are NOW... FINALLY... doing the due diligence that used to not get done. Those things have to be done since everyone if fighting for survival right now. Nobody can afford to do less... except the Feds... who continue to operate/spend like its 1999. More locally, on a smaller scale, I know of specific appraisers & real estate investors who are in jail right now because they finally got caught in a scam where (1) the investor would buy a property at a low price, (2) his appraiser, who was in on the scam, would issue an appraisal that was ridiculously high, (3) the real estate investor would then get a LARGE loan on that property, (4) the investor would then spend that money on "expenses"... showing no money "on paper", it was "laundered" (5) investor would declare bankruptcy and give those properties back to the bank. (6) bank discovers that their "collateral" on a 200K loan is really worth 40K. (repeat times 10 since the investor did this several times over just before declaring bankruptcy. Again, those guys are in jail. And the rules on preventing that have been tightened. I agree, not enough people like that went to jail... but LESS of this gets caught and punished with regard to the Federal government's graft & corruption. -- Rob McEwen http://dnsbl.invaluement.com/ rob@invaluement.com +1 (478) 475-9032