¤ Crise financière : retenir les noms et les visages des coupables
Le site Time a publié la liste des 25 personnes responsables (coupables ?) d’agissements ayant permis le déclenchement de la plus grande crise financière de tous les temps (c’est mon point de vue et je le partage). Cet article reproduit ces textes et ces photos, si j’ai le temps il sera traduit en français, et si j’ai aussi le temps, j’y ajouterai tout autre élément existant du même genre. Voir aussi sur ce site l’article sur Mme ¤ Blythe Masters, la femme qui a inventé les armes financières de destruction massive et détruit le monde. Bonne lecture. Ü.
25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
The good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown
Source : http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1877351,00.html
Full List
-
Blameworthy
-
Poll Results
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1877351,00.html #ixzz2CYXLA4Wb
Angelo Mozilo
The son of a butcher, Mozilo co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the U.S. Countrywide wasn’t the first to offer exotic mortgages to borrowers with a questionable ability to repay them. In its all-out embrace of such sales, however, it did legitimize the notion that practically any adult could handle a big fat mortgage. In the wake of the housing bust, which toppled Countrywide and IndyMac Bank (another company Mozilo started), the executive’s lavish pay package was criticized by many, including Congress. Mozilo left Countrywide last summer after its rescue-sale to Bank of America. A few months later, BofA said it would spend up to $8.7 billion to settle predatory lending charges against Countrywide filed by 11 state attorneys general.
See TIME’s Wall Street covers.
Read « The Savior of Countrywide? »
Phil Gramm
As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee from 1995 through 2000, Gramm was Washington’s most prominent and outspoken champion of financial deregulation. He played a leading role in writing and pushing through Congress the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banks from Wall Street. He also inserted a key provision into the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that exempted over-the-counter derivatives like credit-default swaps from regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Credit-default swaps took down AIG, which has cost the U.S. $150 billion thus far.
See the top 10 scared traders.
Alan Greenspan
The Federal Reserve chairman — an economist and a disciple of libertarian icon Ayn Rand — met his first major challenge in office by preventing the 1987 stock-market crash from spiraling into something much worse. Then, in the 1990s, he presided over a long economic and financial-market boom and attained the status of Washington’s resident wizard. But the super-low interest rates Greenspan brought in the early 2000s and his long-standing disdain for regulation are now held up as leading causes of the mortgage crisis. The maestro admitted in an October congressional hearing that he had « made a mistake in presuming » that financial firms could regulate themselves.
Chris Cox
The ex-SEC chief’s blindness to repeated allegations of fraud in the Madoff scandal is mind-blowing, but it’s really his lax enforcement that lands him on this list. Cox says his agency lacked authority to limit the massive leveraging that set up last year’s financial collapse. In truth, the SEC had plenty of power to go after big investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch for better disclosure, but it chose not to. Cox oversaw the dwindling SEC staff and a sharp drop in action against some traders.