Matt Taibbi's cover story in this month's Rolling Stone, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" continues his excellent ongoing coverage of the immense corruption and malfeasance before, during and after the finance meltdown. As Tabbi points out, the outright criminality on display during the subprime bubble has resulted in exactly zero jail sentences for the men and women whose fraud destroyed the planet's economy. Indeed, many of their firms have gone on to go on to carelessly confiscate their customers' homes regardless of whether the customers were in arrears on their mortgages (indeed, Bank of America infamously foreclosed on someone who didn't even have a mortgage).
The most amazing noncase in the entire crash — the one that truly defies the most basic notion of justice when it comes to Wall Street supervillains — is the one involving AIG and Joe Cassano, the nebbishy Patient Zero of the financial crisis. As chief of AIGFP, the firm's financial products subsidiary, Cassano repeatedly made public statements in 2007 claiming that his portfolio of mortgage derivatives would suffer "no dollar of loss" — an almost comically obvious misrepresentation. "God couldn't manage a $60 billion real estate portfolio without a single dollar of loss," says Turner, the agency's former chief accountant. "If the SEC can't make a disclosure case against AIG, then they might as well close up shop."
As in the Lehman case, federal prosecutors not only had plenty of evidence against AIG — they also had an eyewitness to Cassano's actions who was prepared to tell all. As an accountant at AIGFP, Joseph St. Denis had a number of run-ins with Cassano during the summer of 2007. At the time, Cassano had already made nearly $500 billion worth of derivative bets that would ultimately blow up, destroy the world's largest insurance company, and trigger the largest government bailout of a single company in U.S. history. He made many fatal mistakes, but chief among them was engaging in contracts that required AIG to post billions of dollars in collateral if there was any downgrade to its credit rating.
St. Denis didn't know about those clauses in Cassano's contracts, since they had been written before he joined the firm. What he did know was that Cassano freaked out when St. Denis spoke with an accountant at the parent company, which was only just finding out about the time bomb Cassano had set. After St. Denis finished a conference call with the executive, Cassano suddenly burst into the room and began screaming at him for talking to the New York office. He then announced that St. Denis had been "deliberately excluded" from any valuations of the most toxic elements of the derivatives portfolio — thus preventing the accountant from doing his job. What St. Denis represented was transparency — and the last thing Cassano needed was transparency.
Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?
(via MeFi)
(Image: Whack A Banker by Tim Hunkin with Joanna Lumley, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dullhunk's photostream)
