Sense on Cents

If the guilty verdict rendered yesterday in the trial of Madoff employees qualifies as full and fair justice in our nation, then we need to rethink our justice system.

Now, do not get me wrong. I do not have any sympathy for the sorry looking lot of defendants found guilty yesterday. In my opinion, they deserve what they get and were likely integral in aiding and abetting the massive fraud perpetrated by the swindler Bernard Madoff.

Are we to think, though, that the decades long scam perpetrated by Bernie and his rag tag team began and ended strictly inside his offices?

Folks, let’s not be so naive.

As The Wall Street Journal reports:

One juror, Craig Parise, said Monday that there was no “smoking gun,” but the totality of the evidence was “just overwhelming.” Mr. Parise, a 39-year-old teacher from Westchester County, N.Y., said that the tens of thousands of documents shown during the trial underscored the depth of the fraud. “I did not realize the enormity of it,” he said.

Tens of thousands of documents? The depth and enormity of the fraud?

So the US attorneys trying this case are able to compile and lay out a mountain of evidence to convict a pack of employees who might be challenged to understand the inverse relationship between price and yield, yet somehow Bernie’s bankers at JP Morgan were not similarly aware of what was going on, and the bank walks away with merely paying a fine for its own failures to “know your customer.”

If that is not justice misdirected so as to be denied, then I do not know what is.

But there is more.

Ponder once again Mr. Parise’s quote:

. . . the totality of the evidence was “just overwhelming.”

Yet the SEC and Wall Street’s own self-regulatory organization FINRA did not look at the same evidence in the course of their monitoring this den of thieves? You think that is strictly incompetence? I don’t.

The regulators from the SEC and FINRA have never been held to a full and proper independent accounting for their failure to supervise and regulate Madoff’s scam.

Never.

How does that happen? The Feds protecting their own and an abuse of the absolute immunity privilege accorded to those within government and regulatory offices.

What is absolute immunity without total transparency? Nothing more than a license to steal.

Without a full and proper accounting of the regulators charged with overseeing Madoff’s operations, a sense of full, fair, and proper justice has been stolen from the American public. The resulting double standard further erodes the rule of law in our nation while cementing the cronyism and corruption between Wall Street and Washington that lie at the very foundation of this entire fiasco.

Navigate accordingly.

Larry Doyle

Please order a hard copy or Kindle version of my book, In Bed with Wall Street: The Conspiracy Crippling Our Global Economy.

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The opinions expressed are my own. I am a proponent of real transparency within our markets so that investor confidence and investor protection can be achieved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2014 at 7:00 AM and is filed under FINRA, General, Madoff, SEC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.