A Systematic Rip-off of the Gullible and the Greedy

“In the last 20 years, a great amount of wealth has been transferred from poor and middle class Americans to the rich. During that time, the financial services sector has ballooned to the point that it’s taking over one dollar in every twelve made in America – and has also been revealed as a, quite literal, den of criminals, one so powerful that they can blatantly commit crimes like money laundering for some of the most violent criminals in the world, for years, after being warned over and over again, and simply pay a fine for literally thousands of felonies any of which would land you or I in jail for over a decade, because these companies are so big that it’s impossible for anyone responsible to pay criminal penalties. As someone with not just Wall Street experience but professional experience in mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives,  there’s no possible way for me to see the whole mortgage crisis as anything other than a systematic rip-off of gullible and greedy consumers through criminal fraud, finally passing the buck off to the taxpayers. The last two decades have been a systematic looting of the economy and the Treasury by bankers knowingly committing crimes, and in world where the law was enforced, hundreds of these financial “professionals” would be rotting in prison right now… …and please don’t tell me that this is impossible, because they did it to Michael Milken when I worked at Drexel, and the force of their use of RICO and general aggression was such that he couldn’t have defended himself under any circumstances and had no choice but to plead guilty to criminal charges – but this was in the late 80s when there was still attention given to securities law enforcement and the SEC by both parties in government (and SHAME on America in 2014 that we aren’t even as good as enforcing the securities laws as Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani were in the 80s!)”

Commenter on Metafilter http://www.metafilter.com/135826/For-the-Love-of-Money#5381967

Graph from http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/research_desk_responds_the_fin.html


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