Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Dept. of irresponsible allegations

Kurt Cagle throws around some wild accusations in his XBRL column.
While there are many culprits to blame in this (and its easy to blame anyone and everyone) one group of individuals that are getting especially heavy scrutiny are the banking regulators. It is very likely that some corruption exists here - suborning the regulatory mechanism is the very first step necessary in order to make the kind of deals that ultimately led to the financial collapse possible, and there is no doubt that more than a few regulators should probably be wearing prison orange jumpsuits right now.


And the evidence for that would be? Truly, before you start throwing that sort of allegation around you need to be able to document it chapter and verse. Did the regulators fail to uphold the law? Or was the law bent by their political masters? We will need a detailed analysis of the financial follies of the last decade in order to know who needs to be held accountable.

John Stewart on the blame game
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I realize that this is a somewhat older blog-post, but as the Maddoff Ponzi scheme so aptly illustrates, the SEC under Chris Cox has either been grossly incompetent, has been told to look the other way, or has been complicit in the fraud that's been perpetrated on Wall Street.

Alice said...

Ultimately it may be that Cox did something actionable. It appears that Cox was negligent. But before you say that someone belongs in the slammer, you need to document it real carefully.

It is my personal view that part of the reason our country ran off the rail was pseudo scandals of the Clinton era that were such a large part of the assault on reason that made our present disasters possible.

So time may well vindicate your original view, I just think that you should hesitate before you print stuff like that.

But that is just me.