I get the feeling this was the look on millions of American's faces when they got their first pay check after the FICA holiday expiration. Wait a minute... my taxes pay for social security and medicare?

Really good, from Frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

Watched that last night. Made me pretty upset.

While bing lazy and not taking the time to watch some of the video, I've always wondered exactly what crimes are available that one could charge with.

They were making the case for fraud. Pretty much due diligence workers looking at all these loans were saying they were full of shit but there was pressure from the top to never use the "f" word and when they were brought to the attention of higher ups they'd just say "everything looks reasonable to me".

That movie is mostly about the housing crisis, but one of my real bothers is how bankers get off the hook for helping abet sanctions violations for Iran and others, or helping launder cartel money. The housing crash fraud case is much harder to make than those cases, where there was pretty explicit action taken to subvert the law.

Stolen from Zerohedge (and BTW, Eric Holder fired Lanny Breuer yesterday over publically admitting all this in "Untouchables")




In other words we cannot puursue any crime that could cause investors to sstop pouring money in the markets.

Yeah, it's horseshit. It's not like the government doesn't have the resources to backstop institutions if needed anyway.

Lehman brothers was a mistake, eh?

I don't know that it mattered much in the end (of course it was an important event at the time). But if the government's concern is the stability of the system, and they believe that prosecuting high officials (hint: not entire organizations) will endanger that stability, the government has the ability to maintain financial stability if it wishes to do so. Therefore, concerns about financial stability shouldn't even have the chance to enter the prosecutor's mind.

This.

If the big investment banks are so essential that you cannot arrest a single individual executive from one of them without damaging the US economy then regulators have failed beyond the level of gross negligence and are probably somewhere in the realm of criminal negligence. I am still surprised this guy had the balls to say it publicly.

I read the bit about backstopping institutions as meaning that because the feds can, they should. I suppose that wasn't necessarily what you were getting at.

Well, overall I do think backstopping the financial system in a crisis is important to avoid the most catastrophic outcomes, even though preventing catastrophe has its own undesirable long term effects (moral hazard, for one; for another, the great depression got rid of a lot of debt through default, paving the way for the postwar boom). To what degree that requires backing individual institutions is another question (as is how those institutions should be treated in the longer run--whether the backstopping should be temporary, followed by liquidation of some sort, for example).

But my argument above applied no matter my personal stance on bailouts, lender of last resort, and all that; all I was really arguing is that the government can, if it desires, backstop the system with its financial and legal resources, and even before those are required, simply by credibly promising to backstop the system. Prosecutors shouldn't be worrying about these issues, since other government officials can take care of them.

I dont know what it's like in other areas of the country right now but residential real estate is getting frothy again here...every open house I go to lately on listings that just hit the market are having multiple bids and selling way over listing.

this is a serious question: are rich Chinese people moving to that area of the country in somewhat large numbers?

not at all, this is LA not Vancouver BC

i wonder how cold thodoks is right now.

also, i'm in ohio, so i see no housing froth, and no matter whether a bubble happens, i probably won't see too much.

I dont know if he's posting here or not now...actually the chinese money is drying up at pretty quik pace in Vancouver as well..3 months ago I had my choice of houses here but now it's its way too difficult..it reminds me of NYC real estate at the start of about 2004-5

i guess my moving to california plans are falling to the wayside

depends on where you want to live...still plenty of affordable stuff out there...it's just that west LA near the ocean is getting ridiculous..And San Fran is always bat shit crazy expensive