"As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be with the coming of the Son of man. In the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and being given in marriage, even to that very day in which Noah entered into the ark. They did not know what was happening, even as the flood came and swept them all away." Matthew 24:37-39
Showing posts with label financial crimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label financial crimes. Show all posts
"I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including 'rational expectations,' 'market discipline,' and the 'efficient markets hypothesis' led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur. Not all economists believed this – but most did.
Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft-pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble.
They continue to do so now. At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word 'naughtiness.' This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud."
James K. Galbraith, Why the 'Experts' Failed to See How Financial Fraud Collapsed the Economy, May 16, 2010
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil."
C. S. Lewis
"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them."
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929
Today was a classic 'wash and rinse' on Wall Street, an operation about as simple and obvious as a street game of 'three card monte.'
It is a waste of time and a kind of complicity to try and rationalize it.
And on the surface many people seem to be asking for it.
They can't get enough of con men and quackery.
Whacko-ness and hysteria drive out rational judgement. By design.
"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud. It’s just the opposite. The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis. While they are wrist slaps when properly scaled, you can see the list of 'settlements' made between the government and the big banks here. These 'settlements,' the aftermath of Wall Street's near production of a second Great Depression, entailed not a single criminal indictment. The top two repositories of banksters, based on the number of settlements, are Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.
The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."
"It’s bad enough that two trial lawyers have written a book [cited above] comparing Dimon’s leadership of the bank to the Gambino crime family, and Bloomberg News spilling the secrets coming out of the Chicago precious metals trial, but now Dimon is likely to see new headlines linking his name to questionable payments to Tony Blair and unknown others."
“Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years, and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.”
Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets
“We'll always have Paris.”
Howard Koch, screenwriter, Casablanca
Stocks were in risk on mode today, for whatever reason one wishes to imagine in order to rationalize its irrationality.
The Dollar was up marginally.
Gold and silver were hit lower again as is customary ahead of a non-farm payrolls report.
The amount of criminality and corruption in the US financial system should never be underestimated.
Why the American people allow themselves to be so easily distracted by divisive social controversies while being robbed blind by the kleptocracy is almost amazing.
But there is historical precedent. We know it, but we just cannot see it in ourselves, yet.
We are canning tomatoes tonight, and I did the blanching and peeling on eight quarts of San Marzanos.
Even with all the lack of rain, a proper drought in the past month, the garden is doing very well.
I have a huge pot of green beans that I am making 'West Virginia style.' My wife's maternal grandmother was from there and she always called them that.
Basically you fry bacon and saute an onion in a big pot and then steam the green beans down into them all, cooking out the liquid so that the beans are sauteed as well. Its very good especially if you have more mature beans that are not suitable for steaming. Try to pull off the strings before cooking.
My mind kept returning to Paris today. The last time I was there was in 1992, when I was attending a graduate business seminar at ESSEC concerning the proposed European Union. I think the slogan at the time was 'EU 92.'
The queen was tagging along on this trip and had a grand time, although she never went on a business trip again with me, as leaving the newly born young man with her parents was jarring for her.
Daisy gave the young man his first face licks today He was beaming.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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