Why Aren't These Guys in Jail By Now?

Why aren't these guys being hounded through the streets?

As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody's promoted executives who headed its "structured finance" division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: "toxic assets."

This was fraud, a con game. Moody's was complicit in the corruption of the entire investment system. Once upon a time, investors made money by investing in companies that made things or offered services. Being a successful investor was about identifying potential in products or companies and then putting money into it.

That changed, beginning in 1999 when the Gramm-Leachman Act changed the rules of the game, though some might argue that it really started to change in the 1980s. Investing went from identifying potential for making peoples' live, if not the world, better and, at the higher levels it became largely a swindle. Moody's, and the other ratings companies, became willing participants in the frauds. Those who knew that the securities were prettied-up dog shit sold them to those who did not.

It was a massive global game of three-card monte. Those fuckers stole trillions of dollars and brought the economy of the planet to its knees.

Why they are not already in jail is a shameful question for our time.