There are rare moments in politics when someone breaks ranks with The Powers That Be and stands up for the people and for democracy. Those moments are especially uncommon in the United States Senate, a clubby institution where rabble-rousers are never welcome.
In my lifetime, I can think of a few instances where one or two Senators wisely stood up for principle and against the accepted wisdom of the moment:
Russ Feingold against the Patriot Act.
Ted Kaufman against the Wall Street coverup.
Senator Ted Kaufman (D - DE) will deliver a speech today that represents a potential turning point for the country.
Under the guise of "free markets" and "deregulation," the United States has been laid bare to corruption and pillage of a scale never seen in history. The political leadership of the country, both the Republican and Democratic parties, first enabled this rape with legislation that dismantled regulatory structures that had kept capitalism's worst excesses contained for 50 years. Then these politicians used precious resources to preserve finance capitalism when it managed to destroy itself in the fall of 2008. Now they conspire to keep the truth from the American people about the savage ruthlessness and widespread corruption of the multinational power elite known by the shorthand of "Wall Street."
Today, one Senator takes the floor of the Senate to say "no more." People who care about democracy and justice, whether Left or Right, should have his back.
That report has put in sharp relief what many of us have expected all along: that fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis....
Mr. President, the SEC and Justice Department should pursue a thorough investigation, both civil and criminal, to identify every last person who had knowledge that Lehman was misleading the public about its troubled balance sheet – and that means everyone from the Lehman executives, to its board of directors, to its accounting firm, Ernst & Young. Moreover, if the foreign bank counterparties who purchased the now infamous "Repo 105s" were complicit in the scheme, they should be held accountable as well....
Mr. President, it is high time that we return the rule of law to Wall Street, which has been seriously eroded by the deregulatory mindset that captured our regulatory agencies over the past 30 years, a process I described at length in my speech on the floor last Thursday. We became enamored of the view that self-regulation was adequate, that "rational" self-interest would motivate counterparties to undertake stronger and better forms of due diligence than any regulator could perform, and that market fundamentalism would lead to the best outcomes for the most people. Transparency and vigorous oversight by outside accountants were supposed to keep our financial system credible and sound.
The allure of deregulation, instead, led to the biggest financial crisis since 1929. And now we’re learning, not surprisingly, that fraud and lawlessness were key ingredients in the collapse as well. Since the fall of 2008, Congress, the Federal Reserve and the American taxpayer have had to step into the breach – at a direct cost of more than $2.5 trillion – because, as so many experts have said: "We had to save the system."
But what exactly did we save?
First, a system of overwhelming and concentrated financial power that has become dangerous. It caused the crisis of 2008-2009 and threatens to cause another major crisis if we do not enact fundamental reforms. Only six U.S. banks control assets equal to 63 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, while oversight is splintered among various regulators who are often overmatched in assessing weaknesses at these firms.
Second, a system in which the rule of law has broken yet again. Big banks can get away with extraordinarily bad behavior – conduct that would not be tolerated in the rest of society, such as the blatant gimmicks used by Lehman, despite the massive cost to the rest of us....
Many have said we should not seek to "punish" anyone, as all of Wall Street was in a delirium of profit-making and almost no one foresaw the sub-prime crisis caused by the dramatic decline in housing values. But this is not about retribution. This is about addressing the continuum of behavior that took place – some of it fraudulent and illegal -- and in the process addressing what Wall Street and the legal and regulatory system underlying its behavior have become.
As part of that effort, we must ensure that the legal system tackles financial crimes with the same gravity as other crimes. When crimes happened in the past (as in the case of Enron, when aided and abetted by, among others, Merrill Lynch, and not prevented by the supposed gatekeepers at Arthur Andersen), there were criminal convictions. If individuals and entities broke the law in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis (such as at Lehman Brothers, which allegedly deceived everyone, including the New York Fed and the SEC), there should be civil and criminal cases that hold them accountable...
Mr. President, I’m concerned that the revelations about Lehman Brothers are just the tip of the iceberg. We have no reason to believe that the conduct detailed last week is somehow isolated or unique. Indeed, this sort of behavior is hardly novel. Enron engaged in similar deceit with some of its assets. And while we don’t have the benefit of an examiner’s report for other firms with a business model like Lehman’s, law enforcement authorities should be well on their way in conducting investigations of whether others used similar "accounting gimmicks" to hide dangerous risk from investors and the public....
In Greece, the main transactions in question were called cross-currency swaps that exchange cash flows denominated in one currency for cash flows denominated in another. In Greece’s case, these swaps were priced "off-market," meaning that they didn’t use prevailing market exchange rates. Instead, these highly unorthodox transactions provided Greece with a large upfront payment (and an apparent reduction in debt), which they then paid off through periodic interest payments and finally a large "balloon" payment at the contract’s maturity. In other words, Goldman Sachs allegedly provided Greece with a loan by another name.
The story, however, does not end there. Following these transactions, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks underwrote billions of Euros in bonds for Greece. The questions being raised include whether some of these bond offering documents disclosed the true nature of these swaps to investors, and, if not, whether the failure to do so was material....
Who’s to blame for this state of affairs, where major Wall Street firms conclude that hiding the truth is okay? Well, there’s plenty of blame to go around. As I said previously, both Congress and the regulators came to believe that self-interest was regulation enough. In the now-immortal words of Alan Greenspan, "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity -- myself especially -- are in a state of shocked disbelief." The time has come to get over the shock and get on with the work.
What about the professions? Accountants and lawyers are supposed to help insure that their clients obey the law. Indeed, they often claim that simply by giving good advice to their clients, they’re responsible for far more compliance with the law than are government investigators. That claim rings hollow, however, when these professionals now seem too often focused on helping their clients get around the law....
The accountants and lawyers weren't the only gatekeepers. If Lehman was hiding balance sheet risks from investors, it was also hiding them from rating agencies and regulators, thereby allowing it to delay possible ratings downgrades that would increase its capital requirements. The Repo 105 transactions allowed Lehman to lower its reported net leverage ratio from 17.3 to 15.4 for the first quarter of 2008, according to the examiner's report. It was bad enough that the SEC focused on a misguided metric like net leverage when Lehman's gross leverage ratio was much higher and more indicative of its risks. The SEC's failure to uncover such aggressive and possibly fraudulent accounting, as was employed on the Repo 105 transactions, provides a clear indication of the lack of rigor of its supervision of Lehman and other investment banks.
The SEC in years past allowed the investment banks to increase their leverage ratios by permitting them to determine their own risk level. When that approach was taken, it should have been coupled with absolute transparency on the level of risk. What the Lehman example shows is that increased leverage without the accountants and regulators and credit rating agencies insisting on transparency is yet another recipe for disaster....
Mr. President, last week’s revelations about Lehman Brothers reinforce what I’ve been saying for some time. The folly of radical deregulation has given us financial institutions that are too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to regulate. If we have any hope of returning the rule of law to Wall Street, we need regulatory reform that addresses this central reality.
As I said more than a year ago: "At the end of the day, this is a test of whether we have one justice system in this country or two. If we don’t treat a Wall Street firm that defrauded investors of millions of dollars the same way we treat someone who stole 500 dollars from a cash register, then how can we expect our citizens to have faith in the rule of law? For our economy to work for all Americans, investors must have confidence in the honest and open functioning of our financial markets. Our markets can only flourish when Americans again trust that they are fair, transparent, and accountable to the laws."
The American people deserve no less.