"And we headed out of the hotel, went to the airport, got on the plane and, about halfway through the flight, I found myself alone in the President’s cabin with him. I said, 'Mr. President, you don't have a cold. There’s something going on.' He said, 'You bet there is something else going on.' And he said, 'When you find out, grab your balls and run.' Pierre Salinger, On the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1995
"The value of the e-book is that it has the embedded links in the book, unlike mainstream publishers. The other part about this book is that it is arranged chronologically by topic; one sees how much Congress and regulators have let us down, enabled cover-ups and then failed to act as evidence reached the public domain. We’re seeing it all over again with MF Global."
Janet Tavakoli
The NEW ROBBER BARONS continues financial expert Janet Tavakoli’s on-going chronicle of the global financial crisis captured in her articles from the September 2008 meltdown through February 2012. Picking up where her previous book, Dear Mr. Buffett, ended, she exposes the criminogenic environment that enabled international oligarchs to solidify power.
In January 2009, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, told Tom Brokaw: “the idea that people that move money around are some favored class…strikes me as getting pretty far away from where we should be.” Two years later he publicly excused apparent insider trading by one of his successor candidates, David Sokol.
Berkshire Hathaway officer Charlie Munger admonished law students that Americans shouldn’t be "bitching about a little bailout."
Shortly before Congress confronted him with Goldman Sachs’s profiteering during the financial crisis, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein quipped he was doing “God’s work.”
CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders that he didn’t think JPMorgan made a mistake when it came to potential foreclosure fraud: “maybe we’ll have to pay penalties eventually to some of the attorneys general but we really think we should just continue.” Meanwhile the bank scoured 115,000 mortgage affidavits and reserved $1.3 billion for legal costs.
After MF Global’s October 31, 2011, bankruptcy a U.S. Congressman told former CEO Jon Corzine: "You've got thousands of hard working people around this country that feel cheated."
Tavakoli serves up example after stunning international example of no-strings-attached socialization of losses and privatization of gains. In the words of Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur: "I believe most of us would call that theft."
“That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817
