Senate Investigations Subcommittee: Wall Street and the Financial Crisis

Run time: 06:09 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmlhvkEcb7Y   Posted on YouTube: April 28, 2011 By YouTube Member: SenCarlLevin Views on YouTube: 305   Posted on DU: May 12, 2011 By DU Member: democracy1st Views on DU: 350

 
Senate Investigations Subcommittee Releases Levin-Coburn Report On the Financial Crisis

WASHINGTON – Concluding a two-year bipartisan investigation, Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Senator Tom Coburn M.D., R-Okla., Chairman and Ranking Republican on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, today released a 635-page final report (PDF, 6MB) on their inquiry into key causes of the financial crisis. The report catalogs conflicts of interest, heedless risk-taking and failures of federal oversight that helped push the country into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

Links to the full report and the exhibits are available at the bottom of this page.

“Using emails, memos and other internal documents, this report tells the inside story of an economic assault that cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes, while wiping out investors, good businesses, and markets,” said Levin. “High risk lending, regulatory failures, inflated credit ratings, and Wall Street firms engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminated the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermined public trust in U.S. markets. Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the Subcommittee, the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.”

“The free market has helped make America great, but it only functions when people deal with each other honestly and transparently. At the heart of the financial crisis were unresolved, and often undisclosed, conflicts of interest,” said Dr. Coburn. “Blame for this mess lies everywhere from federal regulators who cast a blind eye, Wall Street bankers who let greed run wild, and members of Congress who failed to provide oversight.”

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=332491

If they are not going to send anyone to prison for this, then the whole congress is complicit and deserves to go to prison for collusion.