Forum Post: No Politics, Only Swift Justice

I am currently a double Masters student in Accounting & MBA, with a double undergraduate degree in Accounting and Finance, so please bear with me if I assume some financial concepts knowledge.

First off, if you truly understood the kind of behaviors the executives at top financial intuitions were doing/encouraging in in late 2006 & 2007 you would have no qualms whatsoever with this movement. For the conservatives who say we are a bunch of lazy sociology majors complaining because we choose a poor major, your quick judgment of individual’s disgusts me, and you obviously don’t understand anything about the current economy or how we arrived in this dire state. Furthermore, stop listening to Fox and MSNBC go at it trying to pit the Tea Party against OCW. OCW is not a political movement like the Tea Party, so quit getting all intimidated by us. For the liberals blaming everything on the Republicans, you need to understand our liberal government bailed out these scum, now they are trying to piggyback on OCW movement, something both party’s seem to be unhappy with. Now political differences aside, for those of you whom may not fully understand the financial behavior taking place or how it was allowed in our legal system, look no further than the passage of The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, otherwise referred to as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. Essentially, it allowed banks to invest your deposits, loosened legislation on how insurance companies invest your premiums, and allowed both of the aforementioned institutions to consolidate with securities companies as well as one another. Ultimately creating the potential for a trifecta of financial services unlike anything seen since pre Great Depression; a bank, insurance, and a security investment company into one unified corporation.

In laymen terms, in 1999 Pandora’s Box was opened. All of a sudden, now we have companies such as AIG dwelling heavily into extremely risky credit default swaps and other derivative instruments, and straying away from their core competencies, i.e. selling insurance. In addition, historically solid companies such as General Electric are losing billions off newly developed banking sectors, as opposed to building refrigerators. You may ask to yourself, who was on the other end of this? The answer: companies like Goldman Sachs and private hedge funds were benefiting the whole way. They were the ones encouraging downright irresponsible policies, i.e. NINJA loans (No Job, No Income, No Assets) and then pooling all of these into a billion dollar mortgage security and selling it for enormous profit to your pension plan as an “Triple A” rated security (highest investment grade, and yes, this actually happened frequently). Then when the bubble burst in late 2007 all these companies’ hands are clean and it ends up being your pension plan getting hammered, and a few companies getting handed all the blame (i.e. Bank of America having Government force them buy a failing Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, ect.). Talk about a trickle-down effect, the effect trickled down through the entire world economy, with Greece recently becoming scapegoat. How on Earth some of these securities were ever rated AAA is a whole issue unto itself, maybe we need to occupy Moody’s and Finch (companies that determine investment ratings) down the road.

But now that you have some background knowledge on what actually happened and how it happened, hopefully you can understand the anger should not be geared toward the 1% in general, as there are hardworking self-made individuals included in that 1%. But instead , question why after the Great Depression and the Savings & Loan Crisis in the 80’s were hundreds of people behind bars afterward, but, for the most well documented financial crisis and nearly most severe has not a single person even been indicted?

So I leave you with this final request, we the 99% want just one thing, and one thing only: Swift justice brought against the white collar criminals whom knowingly exploited our system and brought our great country and the World to the brink of depression.

James C. Engel III