The market first crashed in 1792, soon after the nation's birth, thanks to a merchant prince named William Duer. He was a man of wide-ranging business interests who had supported and made money off the Revolution and who then married into the upper reaches of New York society. He thought he could use his insider connections to Alexander Hamilton to make a killing by speculating in the newly issued debt of the infant government. As so many would after him, Duer overreached. Borrowing heavily to finance his illicit schemes, he went bankrupt when the bubble burst. The New York City economy crashed along with him, and Duer was nearly disemboweled by an enraged mob that chased him through the streets. He died in debtors' prison a few years later."
Crime in the market is now creating a new market--- for criminal defense lawyers. A Harvard Law School blog reports:
"In an era where the financial world is rife with corporate scandal, the demand for attorneys who specialize in white-collar litigation is fast on the rise...
"The market for white-collar criminal defense is very new," (says) Carey Dunne, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell and former prosecutor at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. "Back when I started in the mid-1980s, very few firms had a white-collar criminal practice and there was no focus on the prosecution of corporations, mainly because the Justice Department didn't see fit to do so."
Looks like lots of opportunities for HLS-trained attorneys!"
Clearly, crime is a big business in itself, and deeply intertwined with politics. When the Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was not "going rogue" when caught on tape saying, "I've got this thing and it's f*cking golden, and I'm not giving it up for f*cking nothing," he was expressing a widely shared attitude,
Writing in the NY Observer, Steve Kornacki argues that this is "the exact same thought process - minus the profanity, at least in some instances - that goes through the mind of every politician in the United States who has a valuable appointment to hand out... how different was Blagojevich's scheming in relation to the Senate opening from the kind of horse-trading - much of it subtle and unspoken, but very, very real - that happens virtually every day in virtually every political office in America?"
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