The whole idea of oversight without personal responsibility is a path to failure, especially when there’s so much overlap in the players. Let the principles at the SEC be jointly and personally liable for any losses due to systemic meltdowns of public companies which cost taxpayers money; then you would see some aggressive risk management and real oversight. Until then, all we’re likely to get is calls for more useless, ineffectual oversight which costs taxpayers money for no tangible benefit, and taxpayer bailouts after meltdowns sponsored by corrupt purchased politicians.

The press is practically ignoring the impact of the monolines’ downgrade on these products too…is it really better to keep investors’ heads in the sand?

I don’t see a lot out there, I know of the first one- WAY back in 2005 – WP promoted it, it’s what’s his name from innercitypress.org – one of my favorite resources to learn further about who’s doing what, for worse or for worse. I like those people over at innercitypress, they’re always filing charges, keeping people accountable, they won’t give preferential treatment just because someone is JP or BS.

Either way, I find the whole ‘Did you do your book’ thing over there at Fox and to be fair, OTHER places too – hollow, but I do say – if you did a book on this matter, you could probably help people understand better through the result of your labored efforts here on this subject. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t hit best seller list !

“Really? Did any of those steps include checking in on homeowners who got loans with no money down and no assets?”

Yeah, I think that hits the nail on the head.

I think about this too – the entire no money down, no assets, and probably ? no credit check either. Citi has been found to rubber stamp sketchy 20 to 40% loans through their ugly CitiFinancial unit – “We’ll just check this box here that says you’re a. ok, all right Mr. homeless person” At least Citi has them buy the insurance FOR the loan and embed it INTO the loan and have it paid off from the initial offering (very sketchy).

Now, heh, question is – will the US government be the one with no assets – low GDP, highly inflated currency – will the US be the one seeking a bad loan from say – China come 2009, 2010 ? to help pay for runaway debt.

In so many ways I intuit the federal budget isn’t so far away from BS- Bear Stearns of course on that acronym.

“Ah gee mr. District Attorney – sure they killed em, but you know ? they’ve got 7 top attorney’s – let’s just let this one go ! ?” ???

UNDUE DEFERENCE ?

sheesh

If that’s the approach to an investment bank, what would this look like with a president !? Or Senator ?

“awe, let em go, they have too good of a legal team” ?

ouch !