It'll soon be three years since the Crash of 2008, our country's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The stock market tanked, home values plummeted, investments lost 40-50-60% of their value, our economy went into the ditch, foreclosures exploded, credit dried up, and unemployment soared. Since then, we've had some recovery, but we still have a long way to go.
Remember the rogues gallery of that autumn? Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide Mortgage, Joe Cassano of AIG Financial Products, Dick Fuld of Lehman Bros., Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Thain of Merrill Lynch, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Ken Lewis of Bank of America. Just a partial list of thieves.
Almost 3 years later, none of these financial alchemists has been prosecuted, none of them are in jail. They're all walkin' around fat and sassy, many of them doing business as usual.
Any of them/all of them could be/should be charged with something, such as:
Criminally predatory lending practices.
Intentional failure to disclose risks completely and accurately.
Making shitty mortgage loans, which were then sliced, diced, repackaged and resold over and over again in the most opaque and obscure manner possible.
Giving themselves huge bonuses based on the wildly-overstated valuations of their mortgage-backed assets, which they knew was bullshit.
And how about those spineless whores at Standard & Poor's and Moody's who sold out for a shiny nickel and gave gold-plated AAA ratings to steaming piles of excrement otherwise known as CDO's? Surely they ought to be sued for something.
With the Savings & Loan collapse of the 1980's, over 1100 cases were criminally prosecuted and over 800 bad-actor bankers went to jail.
The Great Scam of 2008 was far, far worse than the S&L crisis, yet so far the collective might and authority of the SEC, Congress and the 50 state AG's has managed to sue one executive from the now-defunct Washington Mutual, and has extracted a $550 million fine from Goldman Sachs (which is like a parking ticket to them). And that's it.
All the money men and the Wall Street players are up to their old tricks, while running PR ad campaigns to remind us just how wonderful they all are. Goldman has glossy two-page print ads telling us how they "helped" build a new arena at the University of Louisville. My personal favorite: A Chase Bank TV ad which promises a "second look" at your loan application. If you don't like their first credit decision ("You're turned down"), Chase will review your app again and give you a second answer ("You're still turned down. Happy now?"). What service!
Buster's idea is this: Take just one of the above miscreants -- let's say Lloyd Blankfein -- and throw him in prison for 6 months. Not a white-collar "country club", but a real prison.
Six months of Lloyd Blankfein taking a daily pounding up the ass, and all his old buddies would get religion real quick. That's all we'd need -- just one of these bastards doing hard time. Wall Street would clean up its act in a heartbeat.