TheBookkeeper

Did CDS Cause All the World's Ills? Confronting the Crisis Backlash

I would love to see a book-keeper's journal and ledger that shows how these derivative instruments are recorded. I don't believe that the present methods of tracking such commercial histories would pass a test for legality..

Can Capitalism Survive Its Latest Entanglement With Socialism?

Does an economist know how double-entry bookkeeping works? It is today's problem, but I never hear it mentioned. Why? A credit default swap would never post in a proper double entry framework of rules.. It is an illegal entry because it commingles rights to ownership. Why is this never talked about?

How to Spend $700B and Actually Solve the Problem

This makes sense, and it approaches the solution used in the Great Depression, when commercial banks were formed. They could only lend county-wide. Banks became a service the citizenry that were restricted from gambling with the citizen's money that was on deposit..

Corporate Fraud + Government Intervention = Bailout Nation

A good, unbiased commentary, for sure.
However, the story misses one important point. The 650 year old double entry bookkeeping framework of rules has never made it into software code. Our present monetary system has no control language with which we can reconstruct its misuse. Without a proper framework of rules, that monetary system resembles the national museum in Baghdad in 2003. When no one is there to guard the treasure the attitude becomes, "If we don't steal it someone else will."
Nobody will be convicted for these frauds because reconstruction the history of facts is impossible using today's financial data management systems. A proper bookkeeping is designed to record a reusable history. It's called "the audit trail." With an audit trail we could go back and reconstruct the facts in detail. Had we had that for the past 30 years, the problem, of course, would never have occurred because most of us only break the law when we are quite certain there is no accountable way to get caught.
The problem is worse today than it was yesterday, and it will be worse tomorrow. The pattern of decay will continue until we decide as a citizenry that an accounting audit trail, that had served commercial trade for 620 years, would make a good idea to return to as soon as we possibly can.