William Barr Quotes

From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.

Once I really got into securities fraud prosecutions, I came to realize how central they were to the maintenance of a free market and how, in many ways, they are far more important to the welfare of our society than many of the more sensational criminal cases that one hears about.

I spoke bluntly about what I had seen in a little over a year as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. To the apparent surprise of many in the room, I observed publicly that insider trading appeared to be rampant.

While short sellers probably will never be popular on Wall Street, they often are the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys!

Securities fraud generally and insider trading in particular should be eminently deterrable crimes.

In the deregulated realm of US banking and finance, crime does occasionally pay for its foul deeds, not in prison time but by making modest rebates to the victims.

Wall Street is greedy, reckless and they operate illegally. That's fine. But what do you do?

Significant officials at publicly traded companies are casually and cavalierly engaged in insider trading. Because insider trading has as one of its elements communication, it doesn't take rocket science to realize it's nice to have the communication on tape.

I think that the S.E.C. has been pretty feckless when it comes to reigning in reckless behavior on Wall Street.

When the SEC needs to be deterring corporate wrongdoing, the 'penalty pilot' program sends the wrong message.

I want to be clear. No company is too big to be prosecuted. We have zero tolerance for corporate fraud, but we also recognize the importance of avoiding collateral consequences whenever possible.

Ordinarily, the feds piggyback on the S.E.C. in complicated financial cases, but history proves that breath-holding on that score is a dangerous endeavor.

That’s typically how the SEC does it. They come in after the crime has been committed they toe-tag the victims, count the bodies, and try to figure out who the crooks were after the fact—which does none of us any good.

My experiences with … SEC officials proved to be a systemic disappointment and led me to conclude that the SEC securities lawyers, if only through their investigative ineptitude and financial illiteracy, colluded to maintain large frauds such as the one to which Madoff later confessed.

Individual bankers are rightly being investigated by the police. I and all colleagues in the chamber hope that if criminality is proven, they will go to jail and bear the same brunt of punishment as any other criminal.

When you're a business man, you have a lot of businesses, a lot of times they think you're laundering money or you're pretending you're writing things off that you don't.

I am profoundly concerned with the current treatment and status of Madoff fraud victims.

The Fraud Act 2006 makes it perfectly clear that Libor rigging is prosecutable as a criminal offence.

Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.

It should strengthen investors' confidence. This is done through transparency, high quality financial reports, and a standardized economic market. This is not just for China, but also for the world market as a whole.

If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.

Those who perpetrate fraud against our financial institutions will be met with the full force of law enforcement.

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.