One More SEC/Citigroup Sweetheart Deal - Five Reasons to Be Outraged | Richard Eskow

theamericanbear:

This article is a bummer. I’ve extracted some of the main sources of agitation:

The SEC announced yesterday that Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled (synonyms for that word include deceived; lied to; tricked and defrauded) investors in a mortgage securities deal, telling them it was a good investment when it knew otherwise and was secretly betting it would fail.

That’s not just slimy. As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commissionfound in other instances, that kind of behavior is also illegal. […]

[Once] again, bank criminals were allowed to walk without admitting anything! Common sense tells us nobody would agree to pay more than a quarter of a billion dollars unless did they’d done something very, very wrong. Yet once again the SEC has negotiated a settlement in which the perpetrator “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

“Neither admitted nor denied”? Citigroup has danced this dance before:

When it was forced to buy back $7.3 billion in bonds in 2008 after deceiving investors into thinking these high-risk investments were low-risk, Citigroup “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When it was forced to pay $1.66 billion in 2008 over its Enron misdeeds Citigroup “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When Citigroup agreed to pay $2.6 billion over its “improper relationship” with the CEO of WorldCom during the scandals there, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When it was fined $275,000 in 2004 for recommending high-risk securities without fully disclosing that risk, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

That’s nearly $12 billion that Citi’s agreed to fork over without ever admitting wrongdoing! If this bank’s not doing very bad things its executives should be fired, because that means they’re the worst negotiators in human history.

Citi’s not the only one. Take JPMorgan Chase, which just took Citi’s crown as “biggest bank in America”:

When JPMorgan Chase paid $153 million in 2011 for deceiving investors it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When Chase paid $25 million in 2010 over the sale of illegal unregistered securities in Florida, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When Chase agreed to pay $55 million in 2009 after banks “allegedly” misled investors into pouring money into a venture that had already failed, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

Even when JPMorgan Chase agreed to a settlement worth nearly three quarters of a billion (that’s “billion,” with a “b”) over somegood old-fashioned, down-and-dirty bribery and corruption charges in Alabama it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

All the big boys have been allowed to walk away without apologizing, confessing, or doing time: Wells Fargo. Morgan Stanley. Credit Suisse. UBS. Goldman Sachs … and many, many more. A rogue’s gallery of bank crooks paid billions in settlements - “without admitting or denying wrongdoing.” [+]

Occupation is the only option at this point. The financial sector is awash in “moral hazard” and neither the president nor the congress nor the regulators in charge of protecting the citizenry from what can only be called “grand theft livelihood” are willing to disobey their corporate masters (or, for that matter, impose meaningful deterrents to ensure that financial crime is actually a disincentive rather than operating procedure).