[D66] Euro-blues/Nutsbedrijven-blues

[Henk Elegeert]

Op 17 februari 2011 22:01 schreef ReindeR Rustema <
discussions at reinder.rustema.nl> het volgende:

Het is genant om herinnerd te worden als klager.
>

Mij hoor je niet klagen ... ;)

Die Ieren dan, dat zijn klagers:

Why haven't the banksters who stole the planet been tossed in
jail?<http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/17/why-havent-the-banks.html>
Cory Doctorow <http://www.boingboing.net/author/cory-doctorow-1/> at 7:49 AM
Thursday, Feb 17, 2011


Matt Taibbi's cover story in this month's *Rolling Stone*, "Why Isn't Wall
Street in Jail?" continues his excellent ongoing coverage of the immense
corruption and malfeasance before, during and after the finance meltdown. As
Tabbi points out, the outright criminality on display during the subprime
bubble has resulted in exactly zero jail sentences for the men and women
whose fraud destroyed the planet's economy. Indeed, many of their firms have
gone on to go on to carelessly confiscate their customers' homes regardless
of whether the customers were in arrears on their mortgages (indeed, Bank of
America infamously foreclosed on someone who didn't even have a mortgage).

The most amazing noncase in the entire crash -- the one that truly defies
the most basic notion of justice when it comes to Wall Street supervillains
-- is the one involving AIG and Joe Cassano, the nebbishy Patient Zero of
the financial crisis. As chief of AIGFP, the firm's financial products
subsidiary, Cassano repeatedly made public statements in 2007 claiming that
his portfolio of mortgage derivatives would suffer "no dollar of loss" -- an
almost comically obvious misrepresentation. "God couldn't manage a $60
billion real estate portfolio without a single dollar of loss," says Turner,
the agency's former chief accountant. "If the SEC can't make a disclosure
case against AIG, then they might as well close up shop."

As in the Lehman case, federal prosecutors not only had plenty of evidence
against AIG -- they also had an eyewitness to Cassano's actions who was
prepared to tell all. As an accountant at AIGFP, Joseph St. Denis had a
number of run-ins with Cassano during the summer of 2007. At the time,
Cassano had already made nearly $500 billion worth of derivative bets that
would ultimately blow up, destroy the world's largest insurance company, and
trigger the largest government bailout of a single company in U.S. history.
He made many fatal mistakes, but chief among them was engaging in contracts
that required AIG to post billions of dollars in collateral if there was any
downgrade to its credit rating.

St. Denis didn't know about those clauses in Cassano's contracts, since they
had been written before he joined the firm. What he did know was that
Cassano freaked out when St. Denis spoke with an accountant at the parent
company, which was only just finding out about the time bomb Cassano had
set. After St. Denis finished a conference call with the executive, Cassano
suddenly burst into the room and began screaming at him for talking to the
New York office. He then announced that St. Denis had been "deliberately
excluded" from any valuations of the most toxic elements of the derivatives
portfolio -- thus preventing the accountant from doing his job. What St.
Denis represented was transparency -- and the last thing Cassano needed was
transparency.

Why Isn't Wall Street in
Jail?<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?print=true>
 (*via MeFi <http://metafilter.com/>*)

(*Image: Whack A Banker by Tim Hunkin with Joanna
Lumley<http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/4406798126/>,
a Creative CommonsAttribution
(2.0)<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en> image
from dullhunk's photostream*)

ACTION <http://www.boingboing.net/action/>,
BUSINESS<http://www.boingboing.net/business/>
, NEWS <http://www.boingboing.net/news/> • TAGS: CORRUPTION, CRIME, ECONOMY,
FINANCE, LAW, ROLLING STONE

"

... see?

De consumentenbond?

Henk Elegeert
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