user396040

SEC vs. Mozilo: Show Trial?

A big difference is that the federal officials were not selling stock in the organizations in which they held positions while they were telling the public that things were fine. Everyone has his own favorite target as the responsible party for this mess. If I had to rank them, I would start with: 1.The ratings agencies (how could they have rated mortgage backed securities triple A); 2. Christopher Cox - a very untimely liberalization of the short selling rules and a refusal to examine hedge fund and investment banking leverage; 3. the leaders of Bear Stearns and Lehman who ran their firms unto the rocks;4. The bankers - Mozilo, the money center bank CEOs and others 5. the leadership of AIG for issuing an unsustainable pile of credit default swaps; 6. the financial press which was asleep as the crisis mounted and then overreacted 7. The FDIC - the WAMU debacle was a confiscation of shareholder and bondholder value which pitched the market over the cliff.