But my generation didn’t get defined benefit pensions or steady careers. We got 401Ks, savings accounts that return 1% or so, and corporate takeovers that lowered our benefits over and over, if they didn’t lay us off for a year or so. So I probably won’t be retiring.

Our economy was stolen, systematically embezzled, looted. The thieves didn’t use the traditional, .45-caliber “innovative financial instrument” for leverage, but they stuck us up even so and continue to do so.

So no generational angst, please. It’s the crooks against the honest and the rich against everyone else. Nothing new.

The way to attack this is to attack the money directly using severely progressive income taxes and and confiscatory inheritance taxes. Eliminate surplus riches and you eliminate loose money in politics.

Concentration of wealth in a few hands is the same as concentration of power. This is why the Right seems willing to let the bulk of the nation’s wealth evaporate: as long as the slice that remains to the wealthiest grows proportionately larger, their power survives and grows.

It’s when some are getting away scot free that people panic and it becomes every man for himself.

This is why I find Mr. Galbraith’s comment about due diligence particularly heartening. We have laws and regulations to handle the potential for chaos. After years of circumventing them, we need to let the rules do their work.

I know a (very) little about bank IT operations, and I wouldn’t worry too much. I’d be more interested in securing the main office email and backups of desktop systems. That’s where it might be possible to hide evidence. Datacenters are probably much tougher in this regard.

There’s a lot of redundancy in bank IT shops–mirrored data centers in different parts of the country, continuous data protection by snapshots, journaling file systems, backup disk storage, and backup tapes both on-site and in bunkers in the desert. So cooking the books in the data center consistently enough to really hide fraud should be impractical.

Security in bank data centers is also pretty tight. I doubt that even the CFO has unfettered access (much less the IT skills to exploit what access he does have). Cabinets are locked, networks are walled off. Lots of stuff is encrypted. Executives get reports, not access to raw data.

The system administrators in the bank data center are probably at least as reliable as branch employees. They have no loyalty to the individual CEOs and CFOs–quite the contrary. Their job is to keep and protect the company records, not the CEO/CFO.

So if bank policy is criminal, the bank records will probably document criminal activity, and hiding it will be more than any reasonable conspiracy can manage. What we lack is the will to look, audit, prosecute, and punish, not the material.

I stand by my statement. The Democrat Party. As a whole.

Are you certain you don’t mean “the Republican party as a hole”?

Credit Default Swaps how can we get rid of them?

New regulation and banning new naked CDSs stops new stuff from appearing and then letting the market work it’s way through existing ones. If they’re related to mortgage backed securities, then a lot of the foreclosures will require the CDSs on those assets to be paid off and that brings that contract to an end.

Any quicker forceful way of dealing with them would be extremely risky in terms of damaging innocents as well as the guilty and of perhaps screwing up the more real market assets and firms which had used CDSs to hedge risky positions.