This article from The Economist made my head spin... Is this another financial system meltdown on the horizon, with more shady doings by the pullers of the moneystrings? Can capitalism withstand yet another scandal? What does our fearless site founder, thick in the middle of things on Wall Street have to say, Leon?
This probably won't make sense, but Capitalism itself is not broken, it's the enforcement/legal part that is broken. Time and again the watchdogs are asleep at the wheel, and then nobody goes to jail after the fact.
Oh, I agree. Even the ChiComs are discovering just how lucrative capitalism can be. Perhaps I asked my question the wrong way... Perhaps it is better asked as "Is this the straw that will break the camel's back for the current regime of money-changers?" Ah - that doesn't sound quite right, either? I just wonder if this will be as big of a scandal as the last one.
What may be clearly the best system currently available, say capitalism, doesn't mean it is being honestly and efficiently implemented or responsibly run.
LIBOR... I know the media wants to tell you folks that this scandal ripped people off but it really didn't What this did was screw other investment banks off (and did NOT trickle down to other forms of loans). You will read gazillion things claiming otherwise but LIBOR benchmark is just that, for marking company's positions and essentially P&L at the end of the day. What Barcs did was something that many other banks in Europe did and I don't know how anyone was NOT aware of it because it's not regulated at all. This was bound to happen and should have happened years ago. Big deal? For banks and the industry, absolutely. For layman? Not anywhere near the housing scandal, CDS implosion, or the Rating Agencies bringing down entire firms.
You mean like this Washington Post financial article? (Emphasis added.) Why is it that it seems like all of the worse financial news in the US seems to have the years 2007 and 2008 so constantly referenced? Are they the years that the genie escaped from the bottle? The year markets or financial secrets were revealed to the public eye? http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/2012/07/13/gJQAoZgwiW_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop
Same crap with the Bernie Madoff scandal, plenty of people were asking questions, but the regulators just turned a blind eye.
As sad and outrageous that the regulators are often so inept or corrupt as they have so spectacularly demonstrated it is also somewhat depressing that they are needed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/libor-investigation-arrests_n_1693222.html Wow - maybe somebody will actually do some jail time for once. I won't hold my breath though, plenty of white collar criminals have slipped through before. If only we could bring charges against some of these regulators for negligence
By the by... Everyone who works on WS, including my own company's employees want nothing more than to prosecute these scumbags. They ruin the image for the entire industry and legit folks who bust their asses from 5AM to 7PM each and every day are tired of these Maddofs, JPMorgans bad trades, LIBOR, etc...
