On 4/19/2010 12:00 PM, John R. Carroll wrote:
Winston wrote:

(...)

It's a little disingenuous to claim that nothing criminal took place
only because the captured regulators were told to regard broad
categories of theft as 'technically legal'.


I follow Moyers to the extent possible and he's just excellent.

There isn't anything "disingenuous" about such a claim at all.

Here is the definition I intended:
Not noble; unbecoming true honor or dignity; mean; unworthy; fake or deceptive.

What definition of the term did you intend?

You and Ig are placing the failure of both the voters and regulatory
agencies on the backs of the regulated.

In what way was Goldman Sachs 'regulated'?

That is the entire point. They simply chose to not be 'regulated'.
Are they guilty? Should their upper management be investigated?
I think so.

Lloyd Blankfein should also be required to change his legal name
to Max Bialystock, (but that's just me).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063462/


I'm not condoning GS's behavior in any way, I'm saying that putting people
in jail anytime someone gets mad is a bad idea.
Even promoting that possibility is counterproductive.

As close as there is to a silver bullet to our current dilemma would have
been to trade derivative products on regulated exchanges.

The regulators would presumably continue to be the same individuals
that have been purchased by Wall Street? I sense a potential problem
with that plan but I can't quite put my finger on it.

At that point, most of the behavior that proved so problematic wouldn't have
happened because all of the sleights of hand would have been obvious in real
time.

To whom? Goldman Sachs was quite aware of what they were doing, all
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Does anyone else matter?

Apparently not.

Another mistake was in letting money, real money as demand deposits, get
into the hands of businesses that are speculative by nature.
Goldman Sach's is a bank and they shouldn't be unless they want to divest
their investment banking and hedge fund divisions.

We agree there.

All of these companies were granted the power to print alternative
currencies that were backed by their actual currency based demand deposit
operations. Only an idiot would expect them not to have gone ahead and done
just that when it could be done in a completely opaque environment. They
would actually have been failing in their duty to shareholders had they not.

Have we fallen so low that fraud is considered 'due diligence'?

The final failure of our government was the lack of any resolution authority
whatsoever.
Having allowed the comingling of previously seperated types of financial
services operations, the resolution authority and mechanisms weren't updated
to reflect the new reality.

They were only doing what they were told to do by their owners, after all.

None of this couldn't have happened in the face of a well informed, active
and motivated electorate.

Had you known for certain in October of 2008 that Goldman Sachs was going to
defraud investors of a billion dollars by selling them instruments based on
worthless mortgage securities, what would you have done to prevent them
from getting their TARP loan?

The universe is expanding but what can we as individuals do?

America did itself and what's "disingenuous" is claiming otherwise.

Nonsense. America was 'done' by Wall Street.

--Winston