Th Untouchables: a Pbs Documentary

The entire purpose of this documentary The Untouchables was to seek an answer to an abbreviated question: why has no Wall Street executive been criminally prosecuted for fraud tied to the sale of mortgages. But the unabbreviated question and the one that infuriates us as Americans is: why has no executive of a major Wall Street firm been criminally prosecuted for anything. Containing interviews with top prosecutors of the DOJ, government officials and industry whistleblowers, Frontline reports allegations that Wall Street bankers ignored pervasive fraud when buying pools of mortgage loans. Tom Leonard, a supervisor who examined the quality of loans for major investment banks like Bear Stearns, said bankers instructed him to disregard clear evidence of fraud. “Fraud was the F-word, or the F-bomb. You didn’t use that word,” says Leonard. “By your terms and my terms, yes, it was fraud. By the industry's terms, it was something else.” Hearing these statements infuriated me more for Leonard was trying to even inform his supervisors of what was going on what some points but they continued to ignore this as well. All the bankers were interested in was profit and money; this is a clear enough view for criminal intent, which the DOJ had been having trouble proving this without a reasonable doubt. If the U.S. Justice Department was serious about doing its job, it has a cornucopia of crimes to pick from: Wall Street CEOs and CFOs attesting to fraudulent financial filings with the SEC, money laundering, lying in prospectuses, illegal foreclosures, rigging the Libor interest rate benchmark and then selling interest rate swaps based on a rigged index to school districts, cities and counties across America, manipulating the futures market with a rigged Libor interest rate, and so forth. From this documentary alone it strikes me as odd that not a single Wall Street CEO or CFO is sitting behind bars serving time for any of these crimes that are so blatantly obvious. The closes