There was a strange moment last week during President Obama's
speech at Cooper Union. There he was, groveling before a cast of
Wall Street villains including Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd
Blankfein, begging them to "Look into your heart!" like John
Turturro's character in Miller's Crossing...when out of the
blue, the POTUS dropped this bombshell: "The only people who
ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we're
proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny."
The Big Secret, of course, is that every living creature within
a 100-mile radius of Cooper Union would fail "this scrutiny"--or
that scrutiny, or any scrutiny, period. Not just in a 100-mile
radius, but wherever there are still signs of economic life
beating in these 50 United States, the mere whiff of scrutiny
would work like nerve gas on what's left of the economy. Because
in the 21st century, fraud is as American as baseball, apple pie
and Chevrolet Volts--fraud's all we got left, Doc. Scare off the
fraud with Obama's "scrutiny," and the entire pyramid scheme
collapses in a heap of smoldering savings accounts.
That's how an acquaintance of mine, a partner in a private
equity firm, put it: "Whoever pops this fraud bubble is going to
have to escape on the next flight out, faster than the Bin Laden
Bunch fled Kentucky in their chartered jets after 9/11."
And that's why this SEC suit accusing Goldman Sachs of fraud is
really just a negotiating bluff to give Obama's people some
leverage--or it's supposed to be, anyway--according to the PE
guy. He dismissed all the speculation that the fraud
investigations would turn on other obvious villains like
Deutsche, Merrill, Paulson & Co., the Rahm Emmanuel-linked
Magnetar and so on.
"You don't get it, Ames. Even Khuzami, the SEC guy in charge of
the Goldman case, is a fraud; the fucker was Deutsche's general
counsel when they pulled the same CDO scam as Goldman. You have
no idea how deep this goes."