Crimes on Wall Street

Very interesting comparison here in this month’s Portfolio magazine by Gary Weiss between crimes on Wall Street and the extensive experience with ending police corruption.

In “Preventing the Next Madoff” he says:

The accepted wisdom is that financial scandals are an inevitable by-product of greed and human frailty-or even the price we pay for a wide-open system that supposedly gives Wall Street its competitive edge over the rest of the world. “Greed will always be with us,” says Lee Kjelleren, CEO of the Museum of American Finance, in Lower Manhattan. “We’re not going to change that.”

Except that maybe we can. Read more

Radical Transparency

Daniel Roth has a great article in Wired on the need for what he calls “radical transparency.”

He makes the case that so many of the “unexpected” events of our current downturn could not have been known by the investing public (and possibly the regulators) because the data was hidden in private sources. Read more