Harry Marcopolos Quotes

The then attorney general had begun a series of investigation which discovered that most of the major Wall Street brokerage houses were engaged in systematic frauds to cheat small investors. One dramatic fraud he uncovered was that the research expert analysts of major firms would recommend the stock of businesses that their firm was doing investment banking for even when they knew that the companies were not doing well or were even in deep financial trouble. See {627544}.

Marcopolos had discovered the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme fraud 9 years before the government discovered the largest consumer fraud ($68 billion) in American financial history. He repeatedly sent warnings and explanations to the SEC investigators, most of which turned out to be exactly right. They ignored all of it, and never investigated Madoff to see if there might be anything amiss.

Kennedy had financed bootlegging operations and had himself been involved in many shady stock deals.

Kennedy, the father of JFK, had been one of the sleaziest of the stock market manipulators in the country. Prior to 1934 the Republican Hoover philosophy had prevailed letting the market regulate itself. But the practices of many of the Wall Street leaders were by modern standards outright thievery.FDR created the first Commission to regulate publicly traded stock transactions and schemes. He made a shrewd pick with Kennedy who was very egotistical and ambitious for power and recognition for Kennedy not only was an accomplished master at the skullduggery of the day, but he had no loyalty to the wealthy brokerage and financial leadership class as Kennedy was a Roman Catholic and at the time Catholics were never really accepted by upper class Protestant society. He turned out to be not only the first SEC Chairman but the one who demonstrated the efficacy of such regulation. He was then rewarded with the Ambassadorship to England the plum diplomatic assignment of the country.

More than 20 years later, after unregulated finance enabled the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, finally got the Securities and Exchange Commission passed by Congress. By the beginning ot the 21st century

Barry Bonds was a star professional baseball player whose accomplishments were aided by taking illegal drugs. He lied about his use of drugs, and the Department made a very large effort over years to finally prosecute him. However during that time there were almost no prosecutions of the thousands of bankers and financiers who had lied, cheated, forged legal documents and in the process almost permanently ruined the American economy—the Great Recession of 2008. The Justice Department claimed that white collar cases are very complex and take longer to prepare prosecutions. Critics claimed that there are so many law breakers, that the government does not want to prosecute all the felons, but just go after a few, and this is easier if time has gone by and public anger has receded or been forgotten.

Actually a few minor characters were prosecuted for financial crimes committed during that period but none were prosecuted whose behavior caused or accelerated the meltdown, and no bank officers were prosecuted despite the FBI reporting that hundreds of thousands of Mortgage Foreclosure involved perjury by bank officers in a pattern that was used by most of the large major banks. The Obama administration was in the dilemma of either choosing one or two bank officers of whom to make an example or if all those who had committed serious crimes were prosecutors, it would involve thousands of the officers of almost every major bank and tens of thousands of officials and mortgage related firms. These were among the wealthiest and most influential people in the country, and there would be few left to build the American Banking System back up when that was one of our most important national priorities. They were also amongst the largest political contributors to both political parties. So the government bailed the bankers out financially, allowed them to maintain million dollar of more salaries and bonuses, and gave the entire batch of people who broke the law a de facto immunity from criminal prosecution. A further complicating factor was that many of the most egregious, greedy, and publicly harmful were not illegal as a result of much change in the law as a part of financial deregulation or were new schemes that the financial industry had successfully lobbied to prevent regulation as with Derivatives.

At this time it was 6 years after the Home Financing Crisis and the Meltdown of 2008 and despite tens of thousands of law violations by the bank, the Justice Department was finally finishing their investigations and requiring some penalties. Other negotiations with other banks were in progress, but no bank executives were going to jail for the millions they handled fraudulently, whereas a burglar who stole household goods would do jail time.