Phil Angelide’s Sorry Beginning

by Jacob Zamansky on January 19th, 2010 at 11:01 am : Comments 000

As I noted in my post earlier this week, I don’t detect enough taxpayer outrage to ensure that Phil Angelide’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) will lead to any meaningful discoveries or reform and thus, my worst fears appear to be well on their way to being realized.  The first two days of hearings were merely political grandstanding and didn’t uncover one iota of new information. It was already well known that Goldman Sachs peddled mortgage-backed securities to its clients and then bet against them. Furthermore, the mea culpas of Messrs. Blankfein, Mack, Moynihan and Dimon didn’t strike me as all that sincere.

Similarly, the decision to probe the actions of regulators back to the Clinton administration is a colossal waste of time and taxpayer resources.  Regulation of Wall Street has been virtually non-existent for the past decade; the little wrongdoing that regulators have uncovered has been addressed with fines so paltry that they barely put a dent in the profits earned from such deeds.  Indeed, Wall Street has long regarded regulators as mere gnats who are using “public service” to further their careers and then land high paying jobs with the companies they are supposedly “regulating.”

If Angelides really wants to elicit some new perspectives and insights, he might consider calling the folks who had the prescience to predict and profit from the collapse of the subprime market.  It would be interesting to know more about these people and why they were so much smarter than the vast majority of people working on Wall Street.

It would also be interesting to find out if the folks who bought Goldman’s mortgage-backed securities really were advised by Goldman that they were shorting the securities….as the company has claimed. I wonder if these clients continue doing business with the firm?

Filed under Congress, Wall Street