"I'm not exactly sure what the basis is for this case. Salespeople not actually believing in a product they're being paid to sell?"
If your implicit point is all that the financial world has left to say for itself, then we've seen only the beginning of its descent both in public esteem and in "real" terms, and the bear market's vicious circle - a lack of faith and a lack of returns feeding each other - may remain unbreakable for a very long time to come. At some point, if the middle class no longer sees its interests advanced by the stock market and the financial system more generally, and begins instead to suspect and ever more easily to believe the opposite, then the old anti-business, anti-corporate, anti-financier, class warfare politics of bygone eras may not be so difficult to revive after all.
As for the specific issue, I'm no lawyer, but some monomaniacally suicidal attorney general could probably make the behavior of Merril and its siblings, in legitimizing and profiting from the great parabolic fraud, look a lot like racketeering if they were so disposed. The whole thing amounts to a massive interstate and international boiler room operation scaled up to the billions or, if you choose to attach the entire hit on the stock market and the economy, and on all the leetle peeple who stand behind those grand abstractions, the trillions.
I heard someone comment that it was somehow comforting to learn that "the analysts," among others, were merely corrupt rather than incompetent. I suspect there was plenty of both - yet another aspect of the New Economy that wasn't new at all. Machiavelli had the whole debacle nailed a few centuries ago: "Men are so slow-witted and give themselves so easily to the desires of the moment that he who will deceive will always find a willing victim." |
