The truth is that the economy had been in trouble for some time, but the signs were either ignored or covered up. And while the government today loves to loudly beret Wall Street executives for their part in the mess, the government was at best complicit in the legs falling out from under the economy while no one knew about it and in some cases, the government is actually at fault.
We are all well familiar with the much publicized fraud cases that the government has prosecuted over the past two years. Bernie Madoff has perhaps been the most well-known of these cases, but there are many, many others where outright fraud was involved in the company's collapse. In each of these cases, just like the Madoff case, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had routinely examined these organizations and found no cause to investigate in spite of repeated complaints by clients or others in the industry.
We are all well familiar with the much publicized fraud cases that the government has prosecuted over the past two years. Bernie Madoff has perhaps been the most well-known of these cases, but there are many, many others where outright fraud was involved in the company's collapse. In each of these cases, just like the Madoff case, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had routinely examined these organizations and found no cause to investigate in spite of repeated complaints by clients or others in the industry.
In other cases, the SEC did investigate but found no wrongdoing. Seriously?! As a CPA, I find this simply hard to believe. In fact, I see it only one of two ways: either the SEC hired the dumbest, least skeptical, most trusting people on the planet and then did nothing in the way of training to equip them to detect fraud OR the SEC examiners were in on the scheme and got paid for looking the other way. I simply cannot believe that they couldn't figure out something was wrong. A lot of other people without subpoena powers or open access to records figured it out!
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