Who’s Not Sorry Now?

[groovedaddy]

“I’m sorry that the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact on our country. I’m sorry for the millions of people, average Americans, who have lost their homes. And I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.”
— Charles O. Prince III, former chairman and chief executive officer, Citigroup, April 8, 2010

“We all bear responsibility for not recognizing this, and I deeply regret that.”

— Robert E. Rubin, former Treasury secretary and former director, Citigroup, April 8, 2010

The latest public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, held last week, made headlines for eliciting more apologies from financiers who presided over the market collapse.

You may recall a similar flurry last year, when Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was widely credited for having apologized for his firm’s role in the financial crisis.

We did not buy it then; Mr. Blankfein never said what he was sorry for or to whom he was apologizing. And we are not buying it now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opinion/11sun1.html?th&emc=th

[ShortnFiery]

1. Congress is not MAKING any of them truly take responsibility.

:grr:

The commission has managed to unearth some compelling testimony. (Last week’s hearings produced detailed evidence of how the mortgage-investment pipeline came to be stuffed with toxic loans.) But the inquiry can strangely lack vigor. It has not issued any subpoenas for documents — satisfied so far with voluntary submissions — and does not administer oaths to witnesses it interviews in private. Lying to a federal investigator is illegal under oath or not, but experience shows that taking an oath is a powerful incentive to tell the whole truth.

The commission is supposed to finish its work by Dec. 15. In the meantime, Congress’s efforts at financial reform appear to be weakened daily by politicians who are more concerned with campaign donations than regulating the financial system. This week, for instance, a Senate committee is expected to propose new regulations for derivatives that are more loophole than rule.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Waaaaaaaaaaay too little, Waaaaaaaaaaay too late.

.....and they all walked away with millions, in addition to the bailout money.

[cutlassmama]

3. That is just words. How about some action?

[PassingFair]

4. Fingers crossed...

Dear PassingFair:

I thought you might be interested to know that, on Tuesday morning, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, held the first in a series of four hearings aimed at unraveling the causes and consequences of the recent financial crisis.

The crisis was not an act of nature; it was a man-made economic assault that cost millions of jobs, evaporated billions of dollars in retirement savings and put our nation in the worst economic tailspin since the Great Depression.

Extreme greed was the driving force of the crisis. And, it will happen again unless we change the rules.

Our hearings are based on a year-long bipartisan investigation conducted by the Subcommittee. The first hearing focused on the role of high risk loans, using Washington Mutual Bank as a case history. It showed how the bank originated and sold hundreds of billions of dollars in high risk loans to Wall Street in return for big fees, dumping toxic mortgages into the U.S. financial system like polluters dumping poison in a river.

The next three hearings will look at the role of regulators, credit rating agencies, and investment banks in contributing to the financial crisis. The Subcommittee will present additional case histories to examine each stage of the assault.

The goals of the hearings are threefold: to construct a public record of the facts to deepen public understanding of what happened and to hold some of the perpetrators accountable; to inform the current legislative debate about the need for financial reform; and to provide a foundation for building better defenses to protect Main Street from the excesses of Wall Street.

My opening statement from Tuesday morning’s hearing goes into more detail and is available at <http://www.levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=323765>.

Sincerely,
Carl Levin

[notesdev]

5. And I can assure you, it's no consolation to them

the hundreds of billions of dollars they made doing it.

If they could go back and change everything, they would, even if it meant having to give back all the money they made causing the problem.

I know this is true, Tim Geithner swears by it.