RoR: Forum

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Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 4:47pm

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What Obama said: "I believe in the power of the free market, but a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it."

What Obama is really committed to: "I believe in the power of government, and government has a license to take or do whatever it wants, however it wants to do it."

(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 4/22, 4:48pm)

Post 1

Friday, April 23, 2010 - 2:53am

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SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed.

SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed
Updated 0752 GMT April 23, 2010 3:52 a.m. EDT
(Full story here)

CNN --
More than half of the workers made between $99,000 and $223,000. All the cases took place over the past five years.
A regional office staff accountant tried to access pornographic Web sites nearly 1,800 times, using her SEC laptop during a two-week period. She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on the hard drive of her laptop.

Well, actually, it was better for all that they were harmlessly entertained instead of actualy enforcing their rules.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 4/23, 2:55am)

Post 2

Friday, April 23, 2010 - 2:19pm

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Fortune: SEC is a Farce.

Read here but don't expect passages from Atlas Shrugged. The article is strongly pro-regulation: the SEC would, should and could do more...

"The SEC is a farce. And it's been a farce for a decade ... We got over 1,000 felony convictions in the Savings and Loan debacle of senior insiders. We have zero today -- of any of the senior lenders in non-prime. That's just an astonishing thing. There have been no criminal charges yet in this crisis. That's the dog that hasn't barked. Where is the Justice Department?
"You can see how vulnerable [Wall] Street is despite its sophistication. And its fancy lawyers, and close to unlimited budget. And that's because the degree of arrogance is astonishing." -- William Black, a financial regulator during the savings and loans scandal of the 1980s who now teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

However, it is not all red flags and Che t-shirts:

"I'm not saying that derivatives desks and structured issuance teams are choir boys. ... But if you attest that you are a sophisticated investor and you have a history of actively investing in the structured products you've got to actually do the credit analysis and understand what you are buying." -- Brad Hintz, analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein and a former CFO of Lehman Brothers.