The Unrepentant and Unreformed Bankers

[boutons_deux]

Money laundering. Price fixing. Bid rigging. Securities fraud. Talking about the mob? No, unfortunately. Wall Street.

A June survey of 500 senior financial services executives in the United States and Britain turned up stunning results. Some 24 percent said that they believed that financial services professionals may need to engage in illegal or unethical conduct to succeed, 26 percent said that they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, and 16 percent said they would engage in insider trading if they could get away with it.

Last year, the profits of the nation's five biggest banks exceeded $51 billion, with their chief executives all enjoying pay increases. By 2011, the 10 biggest U.S. banks held 77 percent of the nation's banking assets.

When Goldman Sachs was charged with failing to set policies to prevent insider trading, it was fined $22 million, an amount the bank collects in about seven hours of trading. Goldman's record $550 million penalty for securities fraud in 2010 amounted to less than 2 percent of that year's revenue.

To block reform, the financial industry has spent more than $317 million on lobbying in Washington over the past two years and more than $230 million in federal political contributions in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

It's been to good effect. Two-thirds of the regulations called for in the financial reform law passed two years ago are still not in place. And the House Republicans, the banks' sturdiest allies, have slashed at the budgets of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to impede their ability to investigate wrongdoing.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-a...comm_ref=false

And the Wall St mafia is giving to Gecko/Ryan much more than Obama, since Gecko is "one of them, the predatory, unethical, criminal financial sector".

[Th'Pusher]

They need to be unshackled tbh.