Friday, October 16, 2009

Wake Up Call For Wall Street?

Not bloody likely. Several Hedge fund executives have been arrested by the SEC for insider trading, and the story would have us believe that Wall Street, that uber den of larcenists extraordinaire, will now behave differently as a result. Well, the denizens of The Street may be a bit more careful than usual as they go about their wanton and instinctive thievery, but don't believe for one minute that they are going to curtail their operations because of this headline making arrest. After all, what did the arrest of Madoff accomplish, besides removing him from the scene and shutting his Ponzi pyramid down?

Oh no, the SEC, about as toothless and compromised a regulatory body as one can imagine-now being run by a callow 29 year old from that vampire squid of a firm, Goldman Sachs- isn't going to change the culture of Wall Street for more than a nanosecond. In fact, these high profile arrests will probably be pretty much all they do by way of law enforcement for a while as dollars to doughnuts says this action was driven by a sense that the SEC needed to do something to elevate their lower than a pregnant ant's belly of a reputation as a watchdog against financial system criminality. I am not exaggerating when I assert that the amount of misconduct about the securities landscape is so vast that it could be likened to the air we breathe, which, of course, one scarcely notices because it is omnipresent.

4 comments:

DED said...

Not bloody likely.

I have to agree.

Thai said...
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Thai said...
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Thai said...

I think I read your two emails back to back