But the bottom line is that a guy in the drug trade, with amazing connections to politicians (the latest are Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi), was treated with kid gloves by regulators, who could’ve easily nailed him first but… didn’t. But maybe that’s just a coincidence.
“Stanford employees yelled ‘Ponzi Scheme!’ 3 years ago”, and the SEC did nothing.
The SEC ignored Madoff completely and was way late to the party on Stanford. The question that must be asked now is, has the SEC become seriously compromised and corrupt?
And was Madoff money-laundering too? Just wondering…
All this must be that unregulated market that neocons praise so highly. You know the spiel, Get the government off our backs and the markets will regulate themselves. Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way, now did it? Instead we’ve had rampant greed and crime in the financial world.
Who could have conceived that the markets, rather than self-regulating themselves like proper gentlemen, instead acted like thugs and pirates? Alan Greenspan now appears shocked, just shocked by this untoward turn of events.
How many more Madoffs and Stanfords are out there? Much of the financial system now seems corrupt, and it’s not just a few rotten apples, either.
Juan Cole pointed out that Greenspan’s comments are a savage indictment of a man who continued to believe Ayn Rand after his twenties, when he was, by implication, entitled to some silliness. For a few microseconds in my twenties, I hung around the libertarians, all of whom were true believers and utterly unworldly, looking for data to support their economic theories that, in retrospect, were akin to “intelligent design.”
What the SEC needs is somebody like Agatha Cristie’s Miss Marple, supposedly a doddering and sweet old lady who holds the most cynical views of the human penchant for wickedness. How ironic that these “tough” Republicans turn out to be a bunch of girlie-men whose naivete makes youth look sophisticated.
Or Greenspan was just using his Randian beliefs as philosophical justification for plundering and looting because “greed is good.”
He was, of course, not just a Rand follower, but early member of her inner circle.