From Newsweek's Michaels Hersch's article Too Big To Jail:
Loewenson, who now helps run Morrison & Foerster's white-collar defense unit in New York. "Look at Lehman, Merrill, Citi, Wachovia ... They just got killed. Unless you're going to say they were all in one big conspiracy, or they all coincidentally happened to have identical conspiracies, the only reasonable explanation is they all got blindsided by a thousand-year storm."
Really Chip. That's the only other reasonable explanation? Please. The banks got killed by their own. Not by some unpredictable confluence of events. Their CEO's and preferred shareholders aimed them at a mountain and jumped out with their platinum parachutes. To sit there and say it's inconceivable that banksters couldn't figure out how to rig a market is disingenuous to say the least and I'll make that clear later.
THESE GUYS SAY DIFFERENT
Tony Accetta, a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, contends the big Wall Street players know far more than they are admitting. For years before the subprime market collapsed, he says, they got in the habit of "netting," which means quietly swapping defaulted loans for good ones for favored investors—
That's right. While your 401(k) may have started out with good mortgages backed bonds; those got traded with Chip and his friends for garbage...I call that bait and switch.
and selling securities that are not as good as you say they are is, on its face, securities fraud. "The criminality lies in the fact that the investment bank now knows that a substantial portion of mortgages are going to go south," says Accetta. "Putting them into securities without disclosing the high probability of default is aiding and abetting mortgage fraud." ...in the final stages of the bubble, Wall Street was largely responsible for much of the bad lending...so desperate...that some of them cut deals with the big nonbank lenders to deliver billions of dollars worth of loans a month, no questions asked. "It's like drugs." Jim Rokakis, the treasurer of Ohio's Cuyahoga County...The guy they really want is the drug lord in Colombia. In this case, the drug lord was Wall Street. This was money looking for people to exploit."
It's funny Chip. Your defense of the banks holds ZERO water and I'll tell you why - They bet hundreds of billions of dollars that bonds they didn't own were going to fail. They bet 5-1 that these bonds were going to fail. And you know what Chip? If a simpleton like me can get that, so can a jury. Chip, as much as I hate to wish you well, I hope you turn into the busiest man in New York this year.
Dave Chapelle and his friend "I didn't know you couldn't do that" CHIP.
This one's for you Jamie Dimon, John Mack,Lloyd Blankfein, Ken Lewis, Vikram Pandit etc.