Quote of the Day

Stealing from our customers is a business decision, not a legal decision.

——An unnamed Citibank Executive

You see, Citi was simply taking money from customers when they overpaid their accounts.

It was called the "sweep" program, and it gets even better:

The same executive later said that the sweep program could not be stopped because it would reduce the executive bonus pool.

Why are we not not sending these assholes to jail?

I know that I'm a bit behind on this story, it broke in 2008, but it still raises the question, why aren't these people going to jail? Why hasn't anyone gone to jail?

You can see the California AG's PR on this here.

Reuters Gets It

In describing a new, "informal leadership directorate" in Europe, the "leaders of Germany and France, the presidents of the executive European Commission and of the European Council of EU leaders, the heads of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the chairman of euro zone finance ministers, and the European Commissioner for economic and financial affairs," is described as a "New Politburo".

Heh.

Deep Thought

My son was talking to me as I was perusing the blog Wall Street Jackass, and he asked if everyone on Wall Street was a jackass.

I told him, "No, they have janitors there too."

It's the Best Monday of the Year

Because it starts an hour later.

I hate daylight savings time, and I am glad that it is over.

So, the October Job Numbers are Out

And they suck wet farts from dead pigeons.

80,000 new jobs on the NFP when natural growth in the labor market requires something like 175K, and while the jobless rate fell to 9.0%, that's because people are stopping looking for jobs.

It's not a time for half-measures.

It Would Be Ironic If…………

Pass the Popcorn

The first big name bankster to get put in the dock is Barack Obama's biggest backer, Jon Corzine for his role in the collapse of MF Global.

You see it appears that first he successfully lobbied regulators to allow the trades that did his firm in, and then the firm commingled customer funds with their own private risk capital,^* so now he is hiring a lawyer:

Jon S. Corzine has hired Andrew J. Levander, a leading white-collar criminal defense lawyer, according to three people briefed on the matter, as the former New Jersey governor deals with fallout from the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm he has run since last year.

Mr. Corzine resigned from MF Global on Friday morning and will not seek $12 million severance payments.

Federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are investigating the $630 million in missing customer money at MF Global.

Mr. Levander could not be reached as he is out of the country, according to his assistant. He did not return an e-mail seeking comment. Daniel O’Donnell, the chief executive of Mr. Levander’s law firm, Dechert, declined to comment.

In Mr. Levander, the chairman of Dechert, Mr. Corzine has retained a New York lawyer who is no stranger to defending prominent Wall Street executives. He represented John Thain, the former chief executive at Merrill Lynch, in a government inquiry related his role in Merrill’s sale to Bank of America. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager who invested with Bernard L. Madoff, hired Mr. Levander to defend him against a New York attorney general’s lawsuit connected to the Madoff case.

The only question now is who is first, Barack Obama, claiming never to have known the guy, or the Republicans, who will try to super glue Corzine to him.

Pass the popcorn.

^*The technical term for this is "stealing".

The Ghost of J. Edgar Haunts the FBI

Well what do you know. The FBI's counterterrosism training is so screwed up that they are literally calling in the US Army to fix it:

To fix its troubled counterterrorism training, the FBI is calling in the cavalry.

The Bureau has turned to the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to scour the FBI’s training materials, after Danger Room revealed that Bureau specialists were teaching agents that “mainstream” Muslims were likely to be “violent” and radical.” The West Point request represents a frank admission from the FBI that it requires outside help to reform.

The Combating Terrorism Center earns high praise from counterterrorism experts as a haven for rigorous, practical scholarship on terrorism and Islamic extremism. Its researchers consider themselves to be the opposite of analysts like William Gawthrop, the FBI intelligence analyst who compared Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader.” The CTC experts’ challenge, as they themselves see it, is to undo the work of Gawthrop and his allies.

“At CTC, there’s an ethos of education,” says Brian Fishman of the New America Foundation, a former research director at the Center. “When you have that, you inherently recognize that you need to illustrate that, for example, the practice of Islam around the world isn’t monolithic.”

I'm not sure that it will help much though, as bigots like William Gawthrop are still employed by, and still exert excessive influence, on the FBI.

It's amazing just how much the FBI continues to be a product of the festering hate and bigotry that was Hoover's fevered mind.

As a first step, how about taking his name off that damn building?