Scary, isn’t it?
Anyone interested in the daily workings of Wall Street and how not to be fleeced like a lamb by the predators based there ought to follow Bill Cara’s blog:
I knew of him as a Canaccord(then Canarim) big shot when I was a Vancouver broker back in the day. He’s a straight-shooter and provides an excellent free service. His paying customers appear to be happy, and I’ve made some good money trading off his insights and work absolutely free.
Trading smarts aside, in today’s post he touched upon this fraught issue:
“First, I would set in place a Congressional impeachment process that would investigate the actions of the former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the then head of the New York Fed Timothy Geithner, removing Geithner from his current position as Treasury Secretary until the investigation was complete. If there was a majority finding that Paulson and/or Geithner abused their authority, I think the permanent record would sufficiently scar their reputations that future appointees to those positions would toe the line.
Second: I would have another Senate committee investigate the trading blotters of Goldman Sachs to determine whether profits in the 3Q2009 (64 trading days) were made illegally via (i) front-running information that came to them from political sources, or (ii) by trading against order flow caused by their “research” analyst publications. I would want to know how much Goldman Sachs made trading against their own clients and whether those clients, being State pension funds, university endowments, hedge funds, and the like, were managed by “friends” of Goldman Sachs. For all those days in the past quarter where there were large gaps at the opening bell, I would want the investigators to determine whether Goldman Sachs traders caused those gaps by earlier trading in international markets and then buying or selling into the order flow after the open. In other words, were the Goldman Sachs’ trades part of a scheme. If any of the above did in fact happen, I would expect the government of the United States to indict and prosecute these people. With all the people involved, I am sure there would be many plea agreements struck that would result in such a large number of senior bank officers and directors going to prison that New York State would have to build another prison, and I’m sure the multi-billion dollar fines at Goldman Sachs would cover the cost.
The public — not just Americans, but people throughout the world who trade in US capital markets — have a need to know the answers to these questions. If there has been fraud, all the perpetrators, including the most senior people in Goldman Sachs and their former employees and associates in government ought to be put on a trial that the entire world would watch.”
I’m just a dumb country boy who dutifully puts his retirement into a 401(k), but something dawned on me reading this article.
Americans have invested tens, if not hundreds, of Trillions of dollars into the stock market in the past 25 years.
After reading this article, it occurs to me that the big Wall Street companies are simply lying, cheating and stealing that money from each other. In the process, our retirement is not growing and many millions are simply having their money stolen from them.
While I fully appreciate your sentiments, surely you're joking.
"With all the people involved, I am sure there would be many plea agreements struck that would result in such a large number of senior bank officers and directors going to prison..."
Now that has a familiar ring to it, say circa 1998 +/- a couple years, & a certain administration's too numerous to mention, errrr peccadilloes?
Of course it didn't happen then and won't happen now and for the very same reason(s). Because we're essentially talking about the very same perps running the very same ruseS on the very same dolts. LOL