The Wall Street financial meltdown of 2007-08 that began with the housing-mortgage crisis in mid-year 2006 and that still persists in mid-year 2012 set in motion a regimen of regulatory reforms not seen since the Great Depression.
Had the regulatory regime of the past engaged in better risk management, the current financial crisis might not have occurred in the first place. Had the financial collapse not occurred, then the uncomfortable sequence of bailouts and exceptional favors for a privileged banking oligopoly “to right the U.S. system” would not have happened.
Now consider that Dodd-Frank was passed to rein in Wall Street risk-taking and oversized bonuses, to end bailouts and too-big-to-fail, and to prevent future financial meltdowns.
Dodd-Frank—consisting of 243 new formal rules and 2300 pages of regulations—was also designed to help protect consumer interests. However, these as-yet-to-be-implemented rules all but ignore the speculative bubbles that caused the financial debacle.
After the whistle-blowing Congressional testimony of SEC attorney Darcy Flynn in the summer of 2011, it became well known that “the nation’s top financial police [had illegally] destroyed more than a decade’s worth of intelligence they had gathered on some of Wall Street’s most egregious offenders,” including insider trading and securities fraud investigations involving such Wall Street heavies as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Deutsche Bank, and many others.[i] All totaled there were the records of some 9,000 investigations of wrongdoing or “Matters Under Inquiry” (MUI) since 1993 that were “deep sixed.” [buried at sea, ed.] There were also a cozy number of cases involving high-profile firms that were never graduated into full-blown criminal investigations because of what has been referred to as an “obstruction of justice” by misbehaving attorneys caught up in the revolving personnel doors of regulation and Wall Street.
Registration no.328239 