Here's Why ONLY ONE Banker Went To Jail For The Economic Crisis

[DeSwiss]

The Young Turks · Published on Jun 7, 2014

"On the evening of Jan. 27, Kareem Serageldin walked out of his Times Square apartment with his brother and an old Yale roommate and took off on the four-hour drive to Philipsburg, a small town smack in the middle of Pennsylvania. Despite once earning nearly $7 million a year as an executive at Credit Suisse, Serageldin, who is 41, had always lived fairly modestly. A previous apartment, overlooking Victoria Station in London, struck his friends as a grown-up dorm room; Serageldin lived with bachelor-pad furniture and little of it — his central piece was a night stand overflowing with economics books, prospectuses and earnings reports. In the years since, his apartments served as places where he would log five or six hours of sleep before going back to work, creating and trading complex financial instruments. One friend called him an 'investment-banking monk.'

"Serageldin's life was about to become more ascetic. Two months earlier, he sat in a Lower Manhattan courtroom adjusting and readjusting his tie as he waited for a judge to deliver his prison sentence. During the worst of the financial crisis, according to prosecutors, Serageldin had approved the concealment of hundreds of millions in losses in Credit Suisse's mortgage-backed securities portfolio. But on that November morning, the judge seemed almost torn. Serageldin lied about the value of his bank's securities — that was a crime, of course — but other bankers behaved far worse. Serageldin's former employer, for one, had revised its past financial statements to account for $2.7 billion that should have been reported. Lehman Brothers, AIG, Citigroup, Countrywide and many others had also admitted that they were in much worse shape than they initially allowed. Merrill Lynch, in particular, announced a loss of nearly $8 billion three weeks after claiming it was $4.5 billion.

Serageldin's conduct was, in the judge's words, 'a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks.' Nevertheless, after a brief pause, he eased down his gavel and sentenced Serageldin, an Egyptian-born trader who grew up in the barren pinelands of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, to 30 months in jail. Serageldin would begin serving his time at Moshannon Valley Correctional Center, in Philipsburg, where he would earn the distinction of being the only Wall Street executive sent to jail for his part in the financial crisis.

"American financial history has generally unfolded as a series of booms followed by busts followed by crackdowns. After the crash of 1929, the Pecora Hearings seized upon public outrage, and the head of the New York Stock Exchange landed in prison. After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. In the '90s and early aughts, when the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble revealed widespread corporate accounting scandals, top executives from WorldCom, Enron, Qwest and Tyco, among others, went to prison." *

In this clip from The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur breaks down all the many reasons why the Obama Administration opted not to pursue prosecutions against the bank executives who caused the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession.

* For more, read the full article by Jesse Eisinger in the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html?_r=1

[Mr.Bill]

1. I'll bet the prison he went to only had

a nine-hole golf course. I bet the tennis courts are not kept up very well either.

[DeSwiss]

4. Yes but the French cooking classes were to die for. :-/ n/t

[blkmusclmachine]

2. Because he wasn't part of "THE FAMILY" (aka "THE FELLOWSHIP")

[DeSwiss]

5. Now that bunch is one sick group of puppies.

And remember, they're just one of the warped group of freaks out there running things. I know it's not well appreciated around these parts always, but I don't have one shred of hope that this system can ever be righted. Collapse of it is our only hope. And left to itself, that's exactly what's going to happen.

- Because no amount of legislation, QE's, patches or fixes can cure the underlying fetid stink of corruption at its core.

[FiveGoodMen]

6. Hillary Clinton described meeting the leader of the Fellowship in 1993:

"Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship to God."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Christian_political_organization)

[DeSwiss]

7. Dominionists are an extremely well-organized bowl of.....

[center][/center]

[FiveGoodMen]

8. Yeah it just bothers me that many HERE are glad to have one of their buddies as the next D candidate

[DeSwiss]

9. I try to live in the ''now'' moment as much as possible, when at DU.

The past is gone and the future is perpetually beyond our reach. Now is all we've really got. It is said that the TRUTH shall set you free.

- But that it'll make you mad first.

[JDPriestly]

3. K&R.

Did someone say "rule of law?"