Stieg Larsson Quotes
Wennerström was devoting himself to fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal–it was business.
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2009.
Here is another example of “the good old days” phenomenon. Similar complaints are made in most generations about most vices.
Commenting on the 1989 savings and loan scandal:
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 the fall of the Soviet Union, the sell off of much of the state assets to private enterprise fell into the control of a few, so called oligarchs. Many of these looted the enterprises that they controlled. None the less, they were considered leading citizens and many were politicians.
While not every person in the stock market was dishonest, a large number were, and the system itself was inherently unfair and disadvantaged the average investor. Despite the many reforms attempted over the years, as the 2008 meltdown proved, the same problem was still with us. Capone was essentially right then and even today.
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 I an era of deregulation, and never even investigated Madoff to see if there might be anything amiss.
The Senator asked Justice Department officials if the reason that there had been no prosecutions of any major financial figures associated with the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession is that they were “too big to jail.” This appears to be the first public official to use this phrase. See {637991} for the Attorney General’s sad but truthful reply.
He was addressing the technique of the Special Prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the relationship between the Donald Trump presidentical campaign and the Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential Campaign
Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson was a Swedish journalist and writer. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after the author died suddenly of a heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. (for the first book only). The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels as of September 2019. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
