Re: And thus steal from every other American who is pursuing Happiness legitimately.
"Stealing"?! If I print my own rolls of $100 notes I don't see how on earth I'm stealing anything from "hardworking, law-abiding" Americans... and if there are 1,000s others doing likewise then the net result will eventually translate as a negligible uptick in inflation....
Now let's see that "pursuing Happiness legitimately" thing:
Ebbers gets 25 years
Former WorldCom chief, 63 years-old, could spend the rest of his life in prison.
July 13, 2005: 10:49 PM EDT
By Krysten Crawford, CNN/Money staff writer
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Ex-WorldCom chief executive Bernard Ebbers was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison for his role in orchestrating the biggest corporate fraud in the nation's history.
Legal experts said the sentence, effectively a life term for the 63-year-old, appears to be the longest ever for a CEO found guilty of committing corporate crimes while running a Fortune 500 company.
Ebbers was convicted in March for his part in the $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom that was the biggest in a wave of corporate scandals at Enron, Adelphia and other companies.
[...]
money.cnn.com
And the WorldCom scandal is just the last one... Remember the S&L swindle in the 1980s, Enron, the bailout of LTCM(*). So much for "pursuing Happiness legally"!
Gus
(*) Summary of the Nature of LTCM:
Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund located in Greenwich, Connecticut. The founders included two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton. Scholes and Merton, among other things, developed along with the late Fischer Black, the Black-Scholes formula for option pricing. LTCM also included as guiding spirit John Meriwether, a former vice chairman of Salomon Brothers and famous bond trader. David Mullins, a former vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System was also part of the LTCM team. Also several important arbitrage analysts from Salomon Brothers joined LTCM. Eric Rosenfeld left Harvard University to join LTCM. It was a very elite group.
The idea behind LTCM was quite simple to articulate but not necessarily that easy to implement. LTCM was to look for arbritage opportunities in markets using computers, massive databases and the insights of top level theorists. These opportunities arose when markets deviated from normal patterns and was likely to re-adjust to the normal patterns. By creating hedged portfolios the risks could be reduced to low levels. According to the model developed by Merton the risk could be reduced to zero, but in practice some of the crucial assumptions of Merton's model did not hold so the risk of the hedged portfolios was not really zero, as subsequent events proved.
Myron Scholes stated the objective of LTCM in a striking image. He said LTCM would function like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up nickles that everyone else had overlooked.
The History
Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was the management arm of a hedge fund that operated from its founding in 1993 to its liquidation in early 2000. It went through a period of spectacular success from 1994 to early 1998. In August of 1998 Russia defaulted on its debt and the financial markets came unraveled. Historical regularities that had prevailed failed to hold and LTCM which had bet on those regularities nearly went bankrupt. It was saved only by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York sponsoring a bailout of LTCM by its creditor banks. The Fed justified its intervention on the basis of the potential of the failure of LTCM precipitating a financial crisis and the creditor banks were enticed into extending credit to LTCM because their financial losses in a general financial crisis could well be more than what they stood to lose if LTCM defaulted on its loans. As it happened LTCM survived long enough to pay off its indebtedness but by early 2000 it was liquidated.
[...]
www2.sjsu.edu
And remember Tenchu: LTCM was bailed out with YOUR money.... Actually, ALL of Wall Street's mess-ups are cleaned up with the taxpayers' monies --that's the name of the game, isn't it? |
