Recently there's been a chorus of demands that someone on Wall Street go to jail, from Matt Taibbi and from Inside Job director Charles Ferguson.
Charlie Gasparino's latest column at the NY Post explains why this rightfully hasn't happened:
Most of what went on in the buildup to the 2008 financial crisis wasn't criminal fraud as much as it was a collective bout of greed and stupidity -- aided and abetted by years of government rescues that gave big-firm CEOs every reason to believe there was no real downside risk.
Gasparino says the SEC is under pressure to prosecute someone at Lehman Brothers, but that they would have a hard time proving criminal activity even by Dick Fuld:
The problem's obvious to anyone who's studied the last 30 years of the government's repeated assistance of Wall Street risk-taking. In 1994 and again in '98, Lehman faced vast losses and possible death because it was holding toxic debt -- and the feds stepped in and bailed out its losses with cheap money and/or a directly engineered a bailout.
As for the accounting gimmick Lehman used just before its '08 implosion, it was approved by the firm's auditor, Ernst & Young -- which OK'd it because other firms had used similar techniques to mitigate losses, without a peep from regulators.
In other words, Fuld really did think Lehman would survive -- because in the past, with the help of the feds, it had.
Read the full thing at NYPost >
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