Dan Donovan Quotes
We're going to be aggressive on Wall Street and in Albany and on Medicaid fraud.
Donovan, Dan. Quoted in "A Republican Hopes to Reverse Albany's Tide." The New York Times, 12 Oct. 2010.
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}.
At the time of this interview there had been a decade of business fraud at many different levels. The regulatory agencies supposedly responsible for the regulation had neither the staff or the political will to even enforce the laws and regulations then in existence and there were many loopholes in those. Many business interests opposed all regulation and strict enforcement as a diminution of the health of the economy. Others, like Greenspan, saw fraud as corrupting the markets themselves and therefore the usual capitalistic economic competitive forces that would control business do not operate with extensive fraud.
In the economic meltdown of 2008 and the aftermath, there were so many criminal violations of law in the financial industry that even the Democratic administration of Barack Obama chose not to jail the violators but to levy some large token fines albeit ones which were very affordable for the institutions who had to pay them—in many cases paying them with money made as a result of profits on no-interest money they received in bailouts after the 2008 Meltdown.
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.
Addressing Theodore Roosevelt in 1896:
Commenting on the 1989 savings and loan scandal:
The representative was opposing currency and monetary reform that would have given Wall Street too much power. His son, the famous aviator, was a Fascist who was a great admirer and supporter of Hitler and Mussolini. The father however was generally liberal as this quotation and {609656} illustrate.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal then created the Securities and Exchange Commission to Regulate the Stock Market and that kept things under reasonable control for over 50 years, but then the fraudulent schemes had gotten very sophisticated and the Enron and other scandals were uncovered, leading to Sarbanes Oxley and other more regulatory legislation.
Daniel Michael Donovan Jr. is an American attorney, former prosecutor, and politician. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the U.S. Representative for New York's 11th congressional district from 2015 to 2019. Donovan was first elected to Congress in a special election. The district includes all of Staten Island, as well as portions of southwest Brooklyn. He was defeated for reelection in 2018 by Democrat Max Rose. Donovan was District Attorney of Richmond County from 2004 to 2015.
