Tag Archives: financial crisis

The Stacy Summary:  I think I linked to an interview of William K. Black awhile back; in case you missed it, here it is.  He was one of the investigators into the S&L crisis which saw thousands of senior execs tossed into jail.  Not one has gone to jail yet, unless you include the nearly SEC chairman, Bernie Madoff, when he was merely operating just one of the hundreds of ponzi schemes.

• Where are the handcuffs?

Yet, in private many lawyers, and some government officials too, seem pretty cynical about just how many jail sentences or fines these initiatives will produce. In part that is because of the sheer complexity of the financial deals in the recent crisis, and the fact that these deals were often deliberately and cleverly constructed to “arbitrage” the law (ie skirt, but not break it).

Another big issue is the sheer number of powerful parties that typically participated in complex finance deals. Few private law firms have the resources or desire to go head to head with numerous Wall Street banks at one time. And government agencies are often short of resources too, partly because some, such as the FBI, have been forced to divert staff in recent years to terrorist financing issues.