Posted on 11/04/2010 6:32:53 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
STIGLITZ: We Have To Throw Bankers In Jail Or The Economy Won't Recover
George Washington, Washington's Blog | Nov. 4, 2010, 7:57 AM
As economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said, we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail.
And Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future. See this, this and this.
Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just agreed. As Stiglitz told Yahoo’s Daily Finance on October 20th:
This is a really important point to understand from the point of view of our society. The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that’s really the problem that’s going on.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
P!
Chris Dodd and Barney’s Frank first.
Bill Clinton and Franklin Raines belong on that List of Infamy as well. It’s unfair that Berney Maydoff is behind bars when these professional Democrat crooks walk free and are rewarded for their crimes.
actually some of them do need to go to jail for selling junk securities to pensioners aka fraud. Instead they settled to use their company to pay the fine instead
So he wants to put Soros and Obama behind bars? I’M ALL FOR IT!
Theatre of absurd - they jailed Martha Stewart, but not the clowns that purposefully destroyed the free enterprise system under color of law.
This guy isn’t talking about putting bankers in jail who committed crimes—he’s talking about jailing bankers in the same way hardcore Marxists jail bankers and other wealth producers for the “crime” of making money. Its a hardcore Marxist view of the world which, disturbingly, resonates with way too many Americans.
” Chris Dodd and Barney’s Frank first. “
Exactly... The author makes no mention of the fact that Congress has been a wholly-owned-subsidiary of Big Banking for decades, now....
It does more harm than good to the ‘public psyche’ to punish one and reward the other.....
and just “who” is going to throw “bankers” in jail?
Barney Frank? Tim Geithner? Chuck-You Schumer? Eric-the-Red Holder? Henery Waxman? Babs Boxer? Hillary? Barry Soetero?
Nobody’s going to jail. The banksters are a gang with power and criminal profits the Crips can only dream of.
I fail to see your point completely. There is no real punishment for what the bankers did, and I see no evidence of him wanting to punish producers. Name one thing these bankers did to produce anything other then huge unemployment, and a wasteland of unsold houses in California?
What he is saying is the fines are so small they have become a part of doing business, so jail time should be a mandatory part of the punishment.
His comment on Bankruptcy is very apt. Bush basically gutted what bankruptcy is.
Amen to that. It's the same old class envy card... yadda yadda rich people, yadda yadda country-club Republicans, yadda yadda fat cats, yadda yadda "the system", yadda yadda "the man", yadda yadda social justice...ad infinitum
"Most Americans have only a vague understanding of the collapse that we have been set up for. If you think the past two years were bad, they were just a warm up to what is coming our way. After analyzing the policies in place and the current political environment, I can assure you that the next two years will be worse that the previous two."
Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz....did this lefty prick Stiglitz get the P.Krugman Nobel prize? He’s a POS and should be thrown in jail also!
I agree. It gets kind of tiresome of listening to simplified explanations as to the meltdown. Finding big money villians who purposely created the meltdown to profit. Other than Goldman can anyone point to one single large commercial or investment bank who profited from the meltdown. They all lost big money up to the point the government intervened. Some went under and some had to be acquired.Basically like any big bubble the banks were no smarter than the average guy. They got buried with mortgage backed securities in their inventory.
If you are familiar with William Black, the few Fed regulators that had experience dealing with fraudulent bankers back in the S&L crisis, they know what they are talking about. It is not about class envy or punishing people for making money. Obama claims to be a leftist and for the working poor, yet he had bent over backwards letting his Wall Street donors walk away from fraud. Rating mortgage backed securities AAA after analysts in the firms had protested to management that the bank clients never furnished any mortgage data for the analysis already puts Moody, Fitch and several major rating companies vulnerable to charges of fraud. Investment bankers selling mortgage backed securities without proper documentation to investors when the prospectus claimed otherwise is by SEC laws fraud. Yet Obama’s SEC and DoJ haven’t made a peep on this violation. Remember within two years of the S&L crisis Bush 41 and Clinton, about 1000 bankers, execs, accountants, lawyers, investors and etc were found guilty, fined, jailed, sanctioned or licenses revoked. Obama only got a few guys like Madoff and etc, but no one connected to the major mortgage bankers that failed or sold fraudulent MBS to investors, pension funds and etc. The CEO of Countrywide Mortgage made 500 million and only paid a 67 million fine to the SEC after striking a deal with them over the violations. Add insult to injury the Bank of America who brought Countrywide as part of the purchase agreement covered the guy’s legal fees. Guess who paid for the legal fees, the Bank of America customers. I haven’t even got started on the crap that happened in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
But the bad debt is not going away. From day one, the banks should be in bankruptcy court and then forced to liquidate all properties. How else to clear the books of this debt?
You completely missed the point. All the big investment banks went public. While the shareholder got left holding the bag the bankers themselves did very well. Greenspan expressed is astonsihment (really, imagine that Allan. You could never have guessed it could come out that way) that corporte governance would be inadequate to the task of reigning in officers willing to risk shareholder wealth for large personal gain.
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