The ticking can be heard like the sea if the enquirer presses an ear to the forged steel padlock that damply secures all access at the base of the tower
March 4, 2013 § 1 Comment
Criminologists know that accounting control fraud causes greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime – combined.
Some of the world’s best economists, George Akerlof and Paul Romer, praised the S&L regulators’ early recognition of these frauds and set out a formal economic theory of accounting control fraud (“Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit”). They ended their 1993 article with this paragraph, in order to emphasize its importance.
“Neither the public nor economists foresaw that [S&L deregulation was] bound to produce looting. Nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus the regulators in the field who understood what was happening from the beginning found lukewarm support, at best, for their cause. Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself.”
The primary reasons that accounting control fraud can produce catastrophic losses are the seeming legitimacy of the firm, the supreme status and respectability of the CEO leading the fraud, the fact that accounting control fraud is a “sure thing” (Akerlof & Romer 1993), the ability of control fraud to hyper-inflate bubbles, allowing the fraud to persist for years and magnify losses, and the paradox that the optimal means for a fraudulent CEO to loot “his” bank is to cause the bank to make exceptionally bad loans.
The last element is so counter-intuitive that despite the accounting control frauds’ dominant role in driving the S&L debacle and the Enron-era accounting control frauds many people cannot really believe that elite CEOs would loot “their” banks despite the many felony convictions of the elite CEOs that drove the two predecessor crises.
“Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,’ Wagner said.”
Wagner is so befuddled that he cannot keep his pronouns straight in the same sentence. “They” is the fraudulent CEO. The fraudulent CEO loots “his” bank. The bank is “themselves” in Wagner’s bewildered sentence. The CEO is not looting himself when he loots the bank. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Irina Ionesco
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