Why Haven’t Bankers Been Punished? Just Read These Insider SEC Emails

[Ichingcarpenter]

Right after the financial crisis, an SEC lawyer fought a lonely struggle to get his agency to crackdown harder on Goldman bankers. He lost.


In the late summer of 2009, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were preparing to bring charges in what they expected would be their first big crackdown coming out of the financial crisis. The investigators had been looking into Goldman Sachs’ mortgage-securities business, and were preparing to take on the bank over a complex deal, known as Abacus, that it had arranged with a hedge fund. They believed that Goldman had committed securities violations in developing Abacus, and were ready to charge the firm.

James Kidney, a longtime SEC lawyer, was assigned to take the completed investigation and bring the case to trial. Right away, something seemed amiss. He thought that the staff had assembled enough evidence to support charging individuals. At the very least, he felt, the agency should continue to investigate more senior executives at Goldman and John Paulson & Co., the hedge fund run by John Paulson that made about a billion dollars from the Abacus deal. In his view, the SEC staff was more worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an email from Reid Muoio, the head of the SEC’s team looking into complex mortgage securities. Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.” This attitude agitated Kidney, and he felt that it held his agency back from pursuing the people who made the decisions that led to the financial collapse.

While the SEC, as well as federal prosecutors, eventually wrenched billions of dollars from the big banks, a vexing question remains: Why did no top bankers go to prison? Some have pointed out that statutes weren’t strong enough in some areas and resources were scarce, and while there is truth in those arguments, subtler reasons were also at play. During a year spent researching for a book on this subject, I’ve come across case after case in which regulators were reluctant to use the laws and resources available to them. Members of the public don’t have a full sense of the issue because they rarely get to see how such decisions are made inside government agencies.

Kidney was on the inside at a crucial moment. Now retired after decades of service to the SEC, Kidney recently provided me with a cache of internal documents and emails about the Abacus investigation. The agency holds the case up as a success, and in some ways it was: Goldman had to pay a $550 million fine, and a low-ranking trader was found liable for violating securities laws. But the documents provided by Kidney show that SEC officials considered and rejected a much broader case against Goldman and John Paulson & Co.

Much More and its a long article also jointly published in The New Yorker


https://www.propublica.org/article/why-havent-bankers-been-punished-just-read-these-insider-sec-emails?google_editors_picks=true

[egalitegirl]

1. Again, how much did they pay Hillary for a speech?

Can someone remind me how much Goldman SAchs paid Hillary Clinton for a speech?

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. I'll check the transcripts....... and look into it

""Its what they offered''

Is all I can find.....

[Octafish]

3. Money.

William Black: Sure. The savings and loan debacle was one-seventieth the size of the current crisis, both in terms of losses and the amount of fraud. In that crisis, the savings and loan regulators made over 30,000 criminal referrals, and this produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as “major” by the Department of Justice. But even that understates the degree of prioritization, because we, the regulators, worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department to create a list of the top 100 — the 100 worst fraud schemes. They involved roughly 300 savings and loans and 600 individuals, and virtually all of those people were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate, which is the greatest success against elite white-collar crime (in terms of prosecution) in history.

In the current crisis, that same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate, among others, Countrywide, Washington Mutual and IndyMac — which collectively made hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgage loans — made zero criminal referrals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Reserve appears to have made zero criminal referrals; it made three about discrimination. And the FDIC was smart enough to refuse to answer the question, but nobody thinks they made any material number of criminal referrals [either].

And what people don’t understand about the criminal justice system is there are roughly a million people employed in it — and of course, millions incarcerated in it. But of the million employees, 2,300 do elite white-collar investigations. And of those 2,300, you have to contrast that to the number of industries in the United States, which is over 1,300. Notice I didn’t say ‘corporations,’ I said ‘industries.’

So a couple of things should be obvious. First, the FBI agents will not have expertise in the industry. And second, they can’t patrol the beat. They have to wait until a criminal referral comes in, and won’t come from the bank itself. Banks don’t make criminal referrals against their CEOs.

It could episodically come from whistleblowers, but against an epidemic of fraud that can never work. It has to come overwhelmingly from the regulators. So when the regulators ceased making criminal referrals — which had nothing to do with an end of crime, obviously; it just had to do with a refusal to be involved in the prosecutorial effort anymore — they doomed us to a disaster where we would not succeed.

Back in the savings and loan crisis, people like me — and I did this personally a great deal of my time — trained not only our regulators, but also the FBI agents and assistant U.S. attorneys on how to identify fraud schemes, how to respond to them and how to document them. We also detailed our top examiners on the most complex frauds, so that they worked for the FBI as their internal experts, and then people like me testified as expert witnesses. And, again, we had prioritized so we were going against the absolute worst of the worst and most senior of the people. None of those things have happened now.

Because of changes in executive compensation, it’s very uncommon for people to blow the whistle in the modern era. What people often don’t understand is that executive compensation bonuses go down very low in the food chain. And so if I’m a boss and I see a crime being committed, it isn’t just that I risk losing my bonus, it’s that Fred and Mary who report to me — Fred with three kids about to go to college and Mary with a kid that has severe problems — they’ll lose their bonuses as well. And so it’s not even my greed — it’s my altruism that gets in the way.

And then the administration has never — both the Bush and the Obama administrations — made a call for the good people to come forward, the ones who fought against the frauds and were disciplined because they did so. And the Frontline special that investigated this found that as soon as word got out, they were deluged with people giving them information, and the common characteristic Frontline found was that the FBI had never even talked to them.

And of course, the Obama administration has been having an unholy war against whistleblowers.

CONTINUED...

http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-execs-went-to-prison-during-the-last-fraud-fueled-bank-crisis/

[lagomorph777]

4. "...good people who have done one bad thing.” - such as destroying the lives of millions...

you know, just one little bad thing - surely they shouldn't suffer any consequence for that...