It would appear to me that salvation of the country lay not in the hands of the attorney, but in the hands of the prosecutors. While we cannot legislate morality, we can certainly enforce codes of conduct and inspire citizens to follow those rules by seeing that the rewards of white collar crime are conviction and prosecution of a nature that will at the very least be cruel and unusual... and leave the offenders broke and penniless upon their return to society. We register sex offenders in this country. Why not register these Wall Street and corporate hoods in the same sense? I don't know if it is because so many people cheat on their taxes and are involved in petty white collare crime themselves, but the for all the clammoring by the public, the perception of white collar crime is that it is not as harmful as capital crimes. If the reward for the kind of crime we are seeing is simply some public humiliation, perhaps a year or two in a country club prison, then retirement to the life of luxury that is waiting in the form of the money that has been siphoned off of the investors, just what kind of message is that sending? The message appears to be that crime does indeed pay.
I could not imagine making a major business decision or signing a contract without consulting an attorney. Setting up a trust or buying a property come to mind also. But for the life of me I don't understand how a guy can be sued for breaking the kneecaps of someone who breaks in to his house. Or smoke smoke smoke, ill sue when I cant breath. Or I know, how about putting scalding coffee between your legs while driving a car, it's a damn good thing Miccky-ds doesn't sell hot dogs.
A large part of the problem with accounting firms is their acceptance of "consulting" jobs IMO. WCOM paid Anderson something like $6 million for the audits and a whopping $12 million for "consultations". There is a real conflict of interest here. A fictitious separation like the Chinese Wall. Monetary nepotism.
Riegel, Having worked on the consulting side of a big 5 firm, I can say that the advice was not much better there. The problem was greed. Partners would rather take fees for a job than to walk away and tell the client this won't work. And the relationship on the auditing side was awful chummy and there was never a focus on a "career auditor." There was a push that you move up to management and manage relationships. Then you have college kids doing the grunt work. Well in the grunt work is where a knowledgeable practitioner finds problems. It is a lot like looking a charts. A new trader/investor does not see the same things in a chart that someone who looked a several thousand does.
Warning, Hypothetical situation to follow: *************************************** Lets say i was a hedge fund operator in london trading the s&p 500 futures. Lets say that I knew all about the wcom news and my TA said things were going south anyway, so I took a large short position. From a fundamental and technical viewpoint, there should be a massive drop. So I decide to go short a few hours before the new york market opens. The market opens down, things look good for me. Then massive buy orders come in and an hour later I am stopped out at a breakeven instead of making a massive profit. I am a little upset by I can take it. Then I see on my bloomberg later on that the Fed was massively buying. Now I am pissed off. Not only that I feel cheated. I had already stopped trading the Japanese market for the same reason. Right then and there I call my boss at the hedge fund and tell him what happened. A meeting is called, and it is decided to completely exit the american market because it is manipulated and we can't trust our analysis anymore.
I think that situation in the previous message is very real and happening right now. It explains a lot about the rapid decline of the dollar vs. the Euro which has been unusually large and steep. It also explains why the fed has been forced to intervene along with the bank of japan ( the two most manipulative central banks right now ) to try to slow down the drop. All of this plus fear of inflation plus political violence explains the surge in gold as well.
Yeah, if that were true it would become not a market anymore, but a construct. Of course the stock market itself is a construct when compared to a guy handing someone a little gold coin and saying "I'll give you this for those twenty chickens". And even that is a construct. Many things move farther out into the left field as time goes by.
well, all discussion aside, if they are going to manipulate and save the market from a crash they had better be in there doing it this week. If all the indexes close at their lows again today I don't see any support for a long way down. 8500 on the dow seems like a conservative target for a swing trade unless we get a bounce and soon.
Why is the Fed buying the S&P market manipulation? If that hypothetical hedge fund manager did not book profits he should get another job. The Fed can step in like any other participant. What they buy, they will sell. We know and accept that agencies of govenrments step in to stabilize currency markets allthe time.
Can I join the Plunge team?? Do I get to wear a special superhero outfit? With a cape? Can I wear my underoos underneath the outfit just in case it rips off during the heat of battle?? Will I be fighting side by side with other superheros? Or will it be an undercover mission? (If it is undercover, I'm still going to wear my underoos). Will I get a ray gun? Or can I use my special eye-laser??