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A new study from the GAO came out, in which the SEC got its annual report card.
You can read the summary of the report in an article in the NY Post, here.
The interesting thing for me is that the penalties being assessed, with great fanfare, are so badly "bungled" that nobody can even be sure they were ever paid.
How convenient for bad guys on Wall Street.
You read that right. The wrist-slap penalties assessed by the SEC, in return for no admission of guilt agreements, are conveniently part of a system that is so badly compromised that nobody can tell if they were ever paid.
Now, how unlikely is that? I mean, you could always keep a ledger - "Fines paid in" - with the date, amount, case number and payer. But I suppose that is far too sophisticated. And it wouldn't allow the miscreants the deniability provided by the same sort of opacity that shields them from scrutiny in the FTD arena. It's all a mystery, thus it is "possible" that everyone is complying. If you've paid any attention at all, this sort of "we just don't know, there is no proof" defense is the preferred one of Wall Street's worst.
So, we don't know who is taking money and failing to deliver, and we don't know how many, if any, of the bad guys, when rarely caught and pursued, actually pay anything.
We just don't know.
Which means there is no reason to believe any of these scumbags pay anything.
Does everyone see what a house of mirrors this all is?
A cynic would opine that we are talking about a sham system designed to defraud investors at every level - at the trading level, where their money is exchanged for worthless IOUs. At the SRO level, where it is wink wink, nudge nudge time in the boy's club. At the regulator level, where amid much fanfare, no change is ever achieved, and it is questionable that anyone ever pays anything for wrongdoing, in the few instances when anyone is fined. At the elected official level, where the various committees allow the wholesale theft of a generation's retirement savings by Wall Street, while debating steroids and gay marriage and the like. At the administration level, where Wall Street bigwigs occupy many of the top positions of power. At the currency creation/banking level, where we pay a private company interest on our own money that our treasury prints and then ships to them, to lend to us at a significant profit.
In Orwell's "1984", there was this overarching totalitarian authority that dictated the actions of the masses, and disseminated disinformation and propaganda to keep them in line. "War is Peace" was one of the lies that was fed to the credulous public - only by engaging in war, and by taking the lives of others in the name of nationalistic interests, could "we" be safe and live in peace. Thus, war was peace. "Freedom is Slavery" was another whopper - that the burdens of choice were an enslavement, whereas by having the superior intellects of the state make your choices for you, you were able to be truly free to enjoy your life.
Anyone seeing uncomfortable similarities in all this? One group, call it the financial/industrial/governmental complex, engages in a power grab and deceives the populace whilst slowly abrogating all rights and freedoms. Lies are the currency of this group, and the populace are its food. Anything goes, as it takes the wealth of a nation and confiscates it through sophisticated artifice too arcane for the average person to comprehend.
Back to the SEC. The computer systems are apparently less secure than a truck stop restroom stall, and likely no cleaner. This raises the question of how confidential all the confidential data could be.
My hunch? Not very.
So we have fines that are unrecorded, information systems that leak like a Haitian life raft, and a financial complex that is as adversarially disposed as one could imagine.
Have a nice weekend. |