Monday, August 18, 2014

WHEN I USE THE TERM "BANKSTERS", I INTEND A BROAD DEFINITION

So it's not just investment bankers, it's also the people in other areas who make their fraud possible, such as the investment ratings agencies and industry consulting firms.  Here's one example of the latter:
Bank Overseer PwC Faces Penalty and Sidelining of Regulatory Consulting Unit
By BEN PROTESS and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
August 17, 2014 9:00 pm
NY Times

The settlement involves the firm’s work for the Japanese banking giant, which regulators long suspected of routing money through its New York branches on behalf of nations blacklisted by the United States. The bank voluntarily hired PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2007 to quantify its improper transactions with Iran and other sanctioned countries.

In the firm’s initial draft of a report about the transactions, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, PricewaterhouseCoopers acknowledged certain limitations of its examination and highlighted in great detail how the bank had stripped out the names of Iranian clients to avoid detection. But when it was time for Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi to file the report with regulators two weeks later, PricewaterhouseCoopers bowed to pressure from bank lawyers and executives, deleting some of the harshest characterizations and diluting others, according to the documents and interviews.

The industry, which includes PricewaterhouseCoopers and another giant accounting firm, Deloitte, as well as Washington power brokers like Promontory Financial Group, has long defended the quality and independence of its work. Yet conflicts are inherent to its business model: Consultants are handpicked and paid by the same banks they are supposed to examine.

1 comment:

Ken Hoop said...



http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/prosecutors-could-send-bankers-to-jail


good Baker post on subject.