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Post by will on Jul 13, 2012 11:50:24 GMT -5
I just read that banks involved in the LIBOR scandal may be fined. That seems silly to me. The banks have been in trouble and regulators require them to have more available capital to avoid more trouble and more bailouts. Fines don't help that situation at all. What would help the situation is some jail time for the individuals who were gaming the system. Then the banks as financial entities wouldn't be damaged yet again by the jackasses who run them, but instead, the jackasses would be punished for their behavior. Any chances of seeing Bob Diamond somewhere in Leavenworth, Kansas any time soon?
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Post by baldrick on Jul 13, 2012 12:30:55 GMT -5
That's the biggest problem I see with the legal structure of corporations. The guilty executives are protected from the consequenses of their illegal activities (except for being fired, and paid a big severance at shareholder expense, of course). The only recourse the law has is to fine the corporate entitiy. They don't seem to be able to touch the flesh and blood humans that are responsible.
As long as corporations are better protected under the law than humans, this will never change.
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Post by will on Jul 13, 2012 14:18:06 GMT -5
The corporate veil is supposed to protect the owners of the corporation from actions of the corporation performed within the confines of the law and the confines of the corporation's purpose. I use LLC structures to avoid putting everything I own on the line when going after business, and that's how it is supposed to work. The work I do and profits I reinvest into the company are the corporation's assets. That's about it. If I do something criminal, I am still on the hook even if I say I'm doing it as part of the company's work or not.
And there's the distinction I see. The people doing the misdeeds aren't always the holders of the bank's equity shares. Some, like Bob Diamond, are large stockholders. But, there is a distinction between things they do or do wrong as corporate owners and the things they do or do wrong as individuals who work for a corporation. The corporate veil is there to protect assets other than the corporation's from loss if the corporation founders, not to shield individuals who work for the corporation from the consequences of criminal activity.
That's the distinction I see and it is one that has been lost. Corporations themselves are not the issue. It's the ability of large, powerful entities to shield powerful people from the consequences of their actions that is the heart of the problem. Think I would get away with crap like fixing a market, even if I did it as a part of a corporation I set up? Not likely. Bob Diamond and his merry band of casual criminals shouldn't either.
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trash
Full Member
Posts: 205
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Post by trash on Jul 13, 2012 15:20:11 GMT -5
Too big to fail, and these fuckin' assholes are too big to got to
Jail.
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Post by baldrick on Jul 13, 2012 16:05:21 GMT -5
As long as the revolving door between the FTC, SEC, DOJ and Wall Street is in place, we will see nothing happen.
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Post by will on Jul 13, 2012 18:12:30 GMT -5
Too big to fail, and these fuckin' assholes are too big to got to Jail. This made me remember a guy who was on death row out here for murder and who lived on as many twinkies as he could get his hands on. He was somewhere north of 400 lbs and his laywers argued that he was too fat to hang. This was a while ago, when hanging was still the way people got executed in Washington State. I don't remember what happened to him in the end. Washington went straight from hanging to injections since then. Ol' Sparky never got used out here, as far as I know. Anyway, I'm not advocating executing those guys. Just stick 'em in prison with a really big biker called "Fluffers" as a cellmate. |
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Post by kitkat on Jul 13, 2012 20:06:58 GMT -5
"Corporations themselves are not the issue. It's the ability of large, powerful entities to shield powerful people from the consequences of their actions that is the heart of the problem."
Yeh...large powerful entities: CORPORATIONS. The sole purpose of corporations is to shield their human operators from personal liability and transfer it to the corporate entity instead. Always has been. Fines are the sole recourse in punishment for a corp. And yes size matters...the more people in a corp the more difficult it is to pin down any personal actions to a legal standard. With what amounts to a sole proprietorship (an LLC with one primary operator) it's easy to go after the individual if the violation warrants it. The whole point in the big boys is obfuscation via plausible deniability. A solution would be a legal assumption that the COO, CEO, CFO and board are defacto *informed* of any and all corp activity and thus all culpable personally. That would fix their wagons.
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Post by will on Jul 14, 2012 13:07:52 GMT -5
It would certainly help. The shielding is an economic thing, though. Criminal behavior, as price fixing and market manipulation are, should be directly attributable to the specific individuals who participated in that behavior as well as those whose jobs it was to supervise them. The CEO, CFO and COO should also be held accountable as you point out, because they have the ultimate responsibility for corporate behavior. We need to see a few more people like Ken Lay taken apart, and I lump the greedy clowns running big banks these days in that category.
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Post by jeromeoneil on Jul 19, 2012 17:06:28 GMT -5
Too big to fail, and these fuckin' assholes are too big to got to Jail. This made me remember a guy who was on death row out here for murder and who lived on as many twinkies as he could get his hands on. He was somewhere north of 400 lbs and his laywers argued that he was too fat to hang. This was a while ago, when hanging was still the way people got executed in Washington State. I don't remember what happened to him in the end. Washington went straight from hanging to injections since then. Ol' Sparky never got used out here, as far as I know. Anyway, I'm not advocating executing those guys. Just stick 'em in prison with a really big biker called "Fluffers" as a cellmate. I remember that. Mitchel Rupe. The judge said he was too fat to hang, and he died in prison in 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_RupeI think that was one of the reasons we switched to the needle. |
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