taway2021s
Conveniently, money is extracted along the way in the form of generous fees, everyone apologizes for the thousand-year event they couldnt predict, and we repeat the cycle. People on the outside make excuses while those on the inside craft brilliant tales of hard work and rugged individualism.
My entire argument was that someone somewhere along the chain was indeed responsible and it doesnt have to be the CEO. Youre arguing that the CEO cannot be completely responsible, which totally sidesteps the 14 other layers of people responsible and also conveniently ignores the other 14 layers that could be held responsible, investigated, and prosecuted.
Fine, the CEO cant be responsible -- is absolutely no one responsible at all within the organization? If so, how did tens of billions of dollars of profits pour in? How can no one be responsible and yet the companies be so profitable?
Probably has something to do with the upper-crust NY culture where those at the SEC, NY Times, SD-DoJ, and Walls Street are all friends. It is also not surprising that the two individuals on whom most issues were hung were a French trader with a deep french accent and an Egyption desk head at a Swiss bank.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/01/gol...
He was literally the ONLY single person who did.
They were taking toxic waste, putting it into cleanly packaged securities, and selling them to pension funds and others who then lost over a $1B: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldmansachs-abacus-factb...
(Plaintiffs claim over $13B in losses: https://www.investorlawyers.com/blog/investors-continue-go-g...)
https://www.ft.com/content/4798ae22-f552-11e2-b4f8-00144feab...
Internally it was a joke they were selling this garbage:
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Former Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre said he “deeply” regretted an email in which he joked about selling subprime mortgage bonds “to widows and orphans” following a grilling from lawyers for the US Securities and Exchange Commission."
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html
(fast forward to real life -- Princeton grads at Goldman Sachs dont go to jail...)
Excerpt from article:
A handful of investors and Wall Street traders, however, anticipated the crisis. In 2006, Wall Street had introduced a new index, called the ABX, that became a way to invest in the direction of mortgage securities. The index allowed traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk characteristics, just as stock indexes enable traders to bet on whether the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or down.
Goldman, among others on Wall Street, has said since the collapse that it made big money by using the ABX to bet against the housing market. Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly.
Even before then, however, pockets of the investment bank had also started using C.D.O.’s to place bets against mortgage securities, in some cases to hedge the firm’s mortgage investments, as protection against a fall in housing prices and an increase in defaults.
Mr. Egol was a prime mover behind these securities.
At the same time, convicting a low level work in his 20s as the ring leader (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/01/fabulous-fa...) is disingenuous.
(documented with emails.) Note there was a civil case (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/01/fabulous-fa...) and a low-level fall-guy in his 20s, and conveniently French, did face civil charges.
Note, non-connected, poor people go to jail for $500 thefts. Lets be honest about what happened here.