same as it always was
Back in the day, Gordon Gecko informed us that ‘greed is good’ and ‘lunch is for wimps’ and they’ve stayed with the generation of a certain age ever since. Even now, the mid-day meal is taken only with a heavy-heart and a cursory glance over the shoulder. Michael Douglas’s portrayal of the soulless, morally-bankrupt character operating in a corrupt, self-centred-self-serving industry could only have been created in fiction, couldn’t it? And in any event, those days have long since gone and have been cleaned up by many city-regulators. Yeah, reet.
What is particularly galling about the latest Forex-rigging swindle is that it was happening as late as 2013, long after the earlier revealed Libor-rigging affair and clearly displaying the fact that the deterrents & controls placed around the banking industry by the Financial Conduct Authority had no effect whatsoever. The Wolf of Wall Street is very much alive & kicking. And whilst I applaud the gaoling of telephone-hacking gossip-mongers I can’t see why swindling an individual, or our own pension fund, out of millions & millions goes without even a prosecution, let alone a hefty prison sentence.
Both scandals, and many more slightly smaller ones to boot, did not start & stop with a handful of overpaid, champagne-quaffing adolescents. For such wrongdoing to take place, it must have been condoned and/or sanctioned from above. Specifically, all the way from the top. If these individuals knew they were complicit and if they didn’t know they were incompetent. You choose. And the worst thing is that either way we’ll carry the can: the banks are seemingly too big to fail and their bankers too big to gaol!
