Saturday, April 17, 2010

Hurray! Gov't Goes After Goldman Sachs paper-hustlers!

On Friday April 16, the gov't went after crookedest crooked thieves at the center of the financial crisis. Indictments and beginning of public legal process involving the dasterdly mathamatical swindle factory of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs.

Apparently, Goldman Sachs was selling clients investments that were design by some big trader betting large that the housing industry was going to collapse. So, selling crap, designed by somebody who was betting it the other way, essentially, fraudulent dealings with the client designed to take their money.

Following the Financial Crisis scandel, reading Matt Taibbi's stuff has been great to keep abreast of the complicated crookednes involving Goldman Sachs and others.

Bearing witness to the financial crisis takes some high-number abstraction math skills and an ability to wade into some truly boring material, but the basic plot isn't so hard to work out. Some rich kids grown big enough (but not morally enough) to figure out how to move a lot of numbers around so that the golden crumbs land on them. And sometimes even better, mega-swindles where millions enter a UBS Swiss Bank with your password on the Euro pile.

To which I say, hurray for good governance. We need the cop on the beat to regulate and police Wall Street. Because when their are billions to make by somehow, oppsy, misreporting something on a piece of paper somewhere, people are going to do it.

Wall Street spent years and millions to dismantle the regulatory function of government in oversight of the banking industry. And now, the unwatched inmates have run amuck,surprise surprise. Here's hoping financial reform happens in a way that protects real wealth (planet, family, food, etc) from the mis-valueing of everything by people who are too cheap to save Mother Earth.

May we someday have a Wall Street sized according to it's function.

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