Finding the 2008 Financial Collapse Criminals

It is incredible, but two years after the financial collapse in 2008, there is finally one possible legal action, one crime identified, in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Incredible!

Notice that at 2:15 into this video, the fact that all the "scuzzy" bank dealings were legal and remain legal despite Obama's "financial reform" law. The politicians are bought off by Wall Street. We are set up for another financial bubble built on scuzzy behaviour, and the taxpayers will again be asked to cough up hundreds of billions to "save Wall Street" in this topsy-turvey lemon socialism that rules America.

Here is a bit from a post by Barry Ritholtz on his Big Picture blog that explains why accounting firms have turned to aiding and abetting fraud in Lehman accounting (and elsewhere). I've bolded the key bit:

The New York attorney general may be bringing a civil fraud lawsuit against Ernst & Young, “accusing the accounting firm of helping Lehman mislead investors,” according to the WSJ.

The accountants were the pushers to the Street’s junkies. They allowed all manner of shenanigans to go on, under their imprimatur of legitimacy. From WorldCom to Tyco to Enron and now to Lehman Brothers, most of these frauds would not have been possible without the loving assistance of large and credible accounting firms.

And they did it for the money. Ernst & Young earned approximately $100 million in fees for its auditing work from 2001 through 2008 for Lehman Brothers.

Some people assumed that the death penalty for Arthur Anderson would have kept the industry in line. But such restraint was not to be. Thanks to yet another piece of radical deregulation, the accounting industry was given carte blanche to run wild. The Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 had created a civil liability out for the accountants. It allowed them to legally become Wall Street’s pushers, no longer answerable to Investors who were defrauded due to their accounting audits. It practically decriminalized accounting fraud.

If you want a wider lens look at the corporate corruption and bought-and-paid-for-governance, read the 2007 book Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston. This was written before the 2008 financial collapse, but it will help you to understand why the economy collapse under all the greed and legal theft permitted by the rules and laws of the United States: