Yves Smith of NakedCapitalism.com who follows details like this closely was underwhelmed, writing: "During the Savings and Loan crisis, Bill Black reminds us that there were about a thousand FBI agents working on the various cases. That's one hundred times the number of people working on a scandal that is about forty times larger and far more complex.
"To put it another way, let's say that this scandal cost the American public $5-7 trillion in lost home equity. That's about $100 billion of lost home equity per person assigned to this task force. If someone stole $100 billion a corporation, like say, if somehow Apple's entire cash hoard which is roughly that amount, suddenly disappeared, I'm guessing that the FBI would assign more than one person to the case."
Okay, these are tough times and the government is pressed and the President is running for reelection with his "bundlers" (i.e . the people who raise the big money) pressing the flesh on Wall Street to find more 1 percent donors. Will this fund-raising effort stymie his hell-raising effort? Stay tuned.
Adds Smith:
"For the last eight weeks, nearly 200 federal examiners have labored inside some of the nation's biggest banks to determine how those institutions would hold up if the recession deepened. Yup, roughly four times as many people were assigned to conduct sham stress tests as are assigned to investigate the causes of the financial crisis and prosecute the people responsible. So we see that this is a not a serious deployment of government resources to unmask a complex economy-shaking financial scheme. It just isn't."
No surprise there. And, as for the causes of the financial crisis, remember the commission that was created by Congress and that found the whole disaster "avoidable." It offered plenty of analysis but quickly led to paralysis with partisan bickering fogging the issues and no agenda for change forthcoming.
Matt Stoller, a former aide to former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, tries to unravel a massive contradiction that rises to the man at the top: "There are two underlying structural problems with the new(ish) Federal task force on financial fraud," he writes...
"One, it is the policy of the administration to protect the banking system's basic architecture, which means the compensation structure and the existing personnel who run these large institutions."Any real investigation into the financial collapse will inevitably lead to the collapse of this architecture. Thus, any real investigation will be impeded when it begins to conflict the basic policy framework of the Obama administration. And this framework is set by Obama. It's what he believes in. He made this clear in his first State of the Union, when he said a priority of the administration was to ensure that 'the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times.'"
Perhaps this is why so few bankers have spoken out loudly about this latest effort to target their financial frauds. They know it's not serious and recognize that political business, like the news business, is now a branch of show business.
And Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not talking either. He has been dead for more than two centuries, along with his social contract.
Cross-posted from Consortium News
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