By Roger Lowenstein
Business Week
updated 5/15/2011 12:17:42 PM ET 2011-05-15T16:17:42
Share Print Font: +-"Forgive me," began Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job, while accepting his 2011 Oscar for Best Documentary. "I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong." The audience erupted in applause.
Ferguson is not the first to express outrage over the lack of criminal cases to spring from the financial crisis, and his speech triggered a wave of similarly prosecutorial sentiments. Since that February night, financial journalists, bloggers, and who knows how many dinner party guests have debated the trillion-dollar question: When will a Wall Street executive be sent to jail?
There are those who have implied that prosecutors are either too cozy with Wall Street or too incompetent to bring cases to court. Thus, in a measured piece that assessed the guilt of various financial executives, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera lamented that "Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks … aren't even on Justice's radar screen." A news story in the Times about a mortgage executive who was convicted of criminal fraud observed, "The Justice Dept. has yet to bring charges against an executive who ran a major Wall Street firm leading up to the disaster." In the same dispassionate tone, National Public Radio's All Things Considered chimed in, "Some of the most publicly reviled figures in the mortgage mess won't face any public accounting." New York magazine saw fit to print the estimable opinion of Bernie Madoff, who observed that the dearth of criminal convictions is "unbelievable." Rolling Stone, which has been beating this drum the longest and with the heaviest hand, reductively asked, "Why isn't Wall Street in jail?"
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