A few of my in-laws are working night and day, literally, to meet the legal document production requirements for a DoJ investigation of a Large Financial Institution which must remain nameless for ethical reasons. The DoJ is doing it's best to investigate Wall Street as aggressively as it can, but their electronic discovery team's annual budget is on the order of $20 million, which is peanuts when an investigation can yield tens of millions of responsive documents.
At what point do the claim "they are doing their best" and the claim "clearly they don't have the resources to do anything" collide and explode into burning rubble?
I can believe that there are many noble individuals in the Doj who are doing their best. But how can one not call a resource-less investigation a tooth-less investigation if you are talking about intentions of Doj itself?
DoJ puts in budget requests to Congress, which then grants, modifies, or denies them as it sees fit. Heads of agency have a surprisingly limited amount of budgetary autonomy; they can't just reroute millions of dollars because they think it would be sensible. Check out pages 59-62 of this document to get an idea of amount of begging required for the pissant sum of $2 million bucks: http://www.justice.gov/jmd/2011justification/pdf/fy11-usa-ju...
Congress has the power of the purse, and can keep the executive branch on a very short lease if it chooses. Meantime, subjects of an investigation can often borrow a tactic from civil litigation and bury the other side (in this case, the DoJ) with heaps of irrelevant or incidental material that will be enormously time-consuming to sort through.
Partly because of Congressional funding decisions going back for years and partly because of inefficiency, government legal investigators are badly lacking in the technical department. Sadly, this state of affairs suits some people very well.
It is hard for me to believe that if Eric Holder and/or Barack Obama were loudly saying "Wall Street is getting away because you aren't giving us funding", things would not change.
... I think the "suits some people very well" part is most to the point. It is hard not to imagine that this group includes those at the highest ranks of government.
Oh come on. Every time Obama says the word 'regulate' someone in the Republican party says it's a 'jobs killer.' [EDIT: 8 out of 10 #is wrong; ooops] 6 out of 8 of the GOP presidential candidates claim they'd slash funding for the courts, with Newt Gingrich saying he'd just ignore Supreme Court rulings completely if he disagreed with them. Sure, that's just big talk designed to get cheap news coverage, but surely you've noticed there's a bit of a political stalemate in DC right now.
Again I raise the possibility that laws were not broken. There may have been instances of fraud, but its more than likely that the mess was largely the result of of groupthink and really bad decisions made in good faith.
Oh I could certainly agree with that. I forget who said 'never ascribe to mmalice what can be adequately explained by stupidity,' but I've found it an excellent yardstick to judge politics by. As far as investigations go, I am not expecting a big showdown at the OK corral. I am just sick of this meme that it's all one big cozy and corrupt club. There are plenty of people in both the private and public sector who are dedicated to the idea of conducting financial business with both legal and ethical integrity.
Securities litigation is slow because it is complex; additionally, there are sound economic reasons why it is often better to settle for the certainty of large fines than waste time and money on uncertain litigation. It's not as if scores of corporate officers went to prison following the crash of 1929 either. Bad policy often ends up as its own punishment.
its more than likely that the mess was largely the result of of groupthink and really bad decisions made in good faith.
More like bad (but probably legal, and probably profitable) decisions made in bad faith. Anyone with half a brain could see that housing prices would not continue increasing indefinitely. But all the incentives in the industry were to make loans that were likely to head into default.
http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i...