Financial Crimes

Arianna Huffington. Pigs at the Trough (2003). Here it is 17 years later, and the game continues. Some of the star players have been retired (some via criminal indictment), the rules have been tweaked to benefit the cheats more than ever, and the referees no longer pretend to control the game.
     Huffington’s book is a detailed overview of the financial scandals of the early 2000s, with names like Enron and Andersen showing up in several chapters. Lessons learned? Just keep on buying the most complaisant legislators available. Five years later, we saw the financial meltdown of 2008, in which the rescue money went to the perpetrators instead of their victims. Business as usual. If the bail-out money had been credited directly to the borrowers’ accounts, most of them would have become home-owners pretty quick, and the decade-long limping towards recovery would have lasted maybe three years.
     History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but humans solve problems in much the way as their ancestors did. These solutions toss up the same problems as before, and the cycles continue. If you find a copy of this book, read it. It will help you recognise the players on the current teams of malefactors. ****