SEC Illegally Destroyed Files and Documents Related to Thousands of Early-Stage Investigations
August 18th, 2011You’ll love this one.
Via: New York Times:
An enforcement lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission says that the agency illegally destroyed files and documents related to thousands of early-stage investigations over the last 20 years, according to information released Wednesday by Congressional investigators.
The destroyed files comprise records of at least 9,000 preliminary inquiries into matters involving notorious individuals like Bernard L. Madoff, as well as several major Wall Street firms that later were the subject of scrutiny after the 2008 financial crisis, including Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and Bank of America.
So what’s the problem? They caught Bernie, didn’t they? The system works great! 😉
I caught a National Proletariat Radio (NPR)story on this today. Boring.
The more interesting story for me is the food fight between Standard and Poors (S&P) and the US Govmint. Why no one got a hair ball when the S&P ranked all of those mortage bonds (or whatever they were packaged as) 3A- the best!
And now we know that was a total fabrication by the S&P.
The S&P also I guess used some weird math to downgrade the U.S. I think overstating the amount of U.S. debt by trillions. Then there is another insider trading issue. Someone dumped, not sure, about a billion in U.S. treasuries prior to the S&P downgrade announcement. If I here the U.S. govmint I’d be getting into the food fight with S&P big time.
Does anyone out there know what bond debt derivatives are?
One very interesting thing related to the bond downgrading is that it caused the markets to go down.
Since the markets went down people went in to bonds, thus making them go up. The very thing that was “downgraded”! So, there is not any kind of a chance of an insider trading indictment here, since bonds were dumped, and then went up!