Unfortunately, this world is not perfect. This world contains people who would sell poison to babies, who would sell peanuts contaminated with disease, who would sell investments and not even bother to make any of the promised investments.
Thieves and con artists who do large scale financial fraud are really smart and have the best lawyers available. The laws need to be carefully defined and water tight in order to convict them for their crimes.
I would not presume to know how to write the laws and regulations that we are going to need. Let the bankers tell us the laws we need, and pass the laws and regulations they recommend.
Otherwise, we will have more Madoffs. It should be noted that Madoff could not have pulled off his scam all by himself. He could never even have had a certified audit of his company. An audit would have exposed his problems, because Madoff never bought a single share of stock, he just pretended to buy stock. Someone at the stock exchanged must have noticed that Madoff did not buy any stock. The SEC must have been asleep at the switch.
My concern is that no one other than Madoff has been indicted. This is an indication that even an ambitious prosecutor does not believe the law is written in such a way that he can convict those who helped Madoff.
If Madoff was smuggling drugs, the government would be going after the 'ill gotten gains' held by his children, and held by executives of his company.
If our laws cannot convict the people who helped Madoff, our laws need to be rewritten. If our laws cannot take the 'ill gotten gains' from Madoff's relatives, our laws need to be rewritten.
Our laws also need to stop the selling of defective products. To stop this, I suggest that we allow a nation to have the 'most favored nation' status revoked if it can be proven that over 1% of the products sold by that nation are proven to be defective. It is time we stopped allowing people to sell us car parts that break down, and computer chips that cause devices to stop working.
No comments:
Post a Comment