Monday 21 May 2012

The Guardian: Criminality in the Financial Services Industry

Link to The Guardian

"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.

"... A reasonable list of prosecutable crimes committed during the bubble, the crisis, and the aftermath period by financial services firms includes: securities fraud, accounting fraud, honest services violations, bribery, perjury and making false statements to US government investigators, Sarbanes-Oxley violations (false accounting), Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Criminal Organisations Act) offences, federal aid disclosure regulations offences and personal conduct offences (drug use, tax evasion etc)."



Li nk to The I ndipendent
The Independent: "Have the policymakers at the Bank of England gone completely nuts?"

"The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) last week published its latest forecasts for the British economy in its May Inflation Report. This followed its meeting a week earlier when it decided, presumably much to Chancellor Osborne's chagrin, that it would make no change either to interest rates or to the scale of its asset purchase programme.

"One of the major lessons from the 1930s is that central bankers are not powerless to act even if they think they are, and more action is better than less. So once again, in my view, the collective sitting on hands looks a major policy error."

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