Prosecution 2 Step

Far too many times has BRT railed against the less than useless Eric Holder and the minions at Justice regarding the total failure of throwing the Bankters in jail for stealing our money. First it was Too Big to Fail and second, "the banks are too powerful for us to prosecute" as the two "essential" excuses used to not pull the trigger on prosecuting these bastards to the full extent of the law. Well, William K. Black of the S&L Scandal fame, has come up with the Idiots Guide to Prosecuting Corporate Frauds, a suggestion whose time has come if we get a president like Bernie who has the guts to do a long overdue deed of putting these sleazoids behind bars for financial malfeasance that goes above and beyond the call of duty. :)

One of the first steps the group proposes – echoing the recommendations Senator Elizabeth Warren made last week – involves appointing aggressive leadership at federal agencies with no conflicts of interest with the entities they regulate, and hiring enough staff trained in criminology and financial fraud to attack the problem.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” said Black. “The Justice Department forgot there was a wheel.”

The template for the plan is the saving and loan crisis of the late 1980s, when just one federal agency, the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) issued over 30,000 criminal referrals and over 1,000 major bank executives went to prison.

By comparison, in the 2008 financial crisis, OTS and their bank regulator counterparts made zero outside criminal referrals on financial crimes. And more recently, the rate of corporate prosecutions has been pathetic.

It gets better.

Black says the Top 100 list led to prosecuting 300 savings and loans and 600 officials. “And despite the banks having the best lawyers in the world, we still got a 90 percent conviction rate.”

Sounds like a plan to me.

William K. Black