SEC Staffers Spend Their Workday Watching Porn

So how did Bernie Madoff pull off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history?
Why have American’s retirement funds lost so much value?
How are people in the stock market still getting away with insider trading?

It’s simple.

Instead of keeping an eye on the financial markets, employees of the Securities And Exchange Commission were keeping their eyes on porno websites.

The Securities and Exchange Commission may have found the real reason it missed giant frauds such as Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme: Its employees were too busy trying to access porn at their desks.

About two dozen employees over the past two years have been caught using SEC computers to try to access porn Web sites, including one regional supervisor who made 1,800 attempts over a 17-day period but was denied access by monitoring software.

The situation became a big enough problem that the SEC’s inspector general has sent four internal reports on the topic to Congress over the past two years, according to The Washington Times, which first reported on the sex-starved SEC workers after obtaining information on the computer abuse through a Freedom of Information Act request.

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Obama’s Bank Reforms Won’t Reform Anything

Except in the case of making things, the economy in particular, even worse.

 

Of course, just about everything has gotten worse since Obama became President.

And he’s not done yet.

 

Barack Obama calling himself a financial reformer is kind of like a drug dealer calling himself an unlicensed pharmacist.

 

 

 

After the Democrats’ disaster in Massachusetts last Tuesday, President Obama appears to be flailing. Gone is the cool and measured demeanor that made him look presidential when the financial crisis struck during the 2008 campaign. Instead, the financial reform proposals he advanced later in the week seem to reflect political panic—a desperate attempt to appeal to the populist sentiment against Wall Street. Unfortunately, they also reflect a limited understanding of good financial or banking policy.

First, Mr. Obama has proposed to limit the size of banks or their holding companies, or both. The trouble with limiting the size of these institutions is that no one has the faintest idea what the right size is. What’s more, if the purpose of the size limit is to prevent a bank or bank holding company from being or becoming too big to fail, we have to know what size would cause a failed institution to cause a financial train wreck. No one knows that, either. Under these circumstances, it’s hard to take such a proposal seriously.

Second, Mr. Obama says that some firms should be prohibited from engaging in “proprietary trading.” The White House announcement seems to apply to both banks and bank holding companies, but there is a huge difference between them. A bank is chartered by the government, its deposits are insured, it can participate in the U.S. payment system, and it has access to the Fed’s discount window. None of these things is true of a bank holding company—which is an ordinary corporation that controls a bank.

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Barack Obama Is Loosing Some Of His Biggest Supporters

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.

But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now…Read the rest of this entry

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

America is teetering on the brink of what may well  become the worst financial crisis in the nation’s history. (as if it wasn’t bad enough already)
And I’ve heard many people ask “Didn’t anyone see this coming?”

Yes, some people did.
But no one listened.