"When I was a young central banker, we often spent our lunchtimes debating how best to rob our employer. ...I can now see I was a central banker of very little brain--and lacking ambition. The way to rob a central bank efficiently is to be a bank executive so skilled in financial engineering that I take my bank to the edge of extinction. I can then swap all my unpriceable, illiquid, engineered credit instruments for good central bank cash and Treasuries. That's larceny without risk, making the central bank a complicit partner in the looting of its vaults, and earning gratitude and bonuses instead of audits and indictments", London Banker (LB) at http://www.rgemonitor.com/, 15 May 2008.
This is LB's first post at RGE Monitor. Read it. I love you LB. Enjoy. Laugh. Cry. LB is RGE's Spengler. I have said things like LB for years. Willie Sutton (WS), bank robber, spent about 35 of his 79 years in prison for bank robbery. When last released he was asked if he would do it again. WS said no, He would become an accountant. WS is asked why? WS responds because you can steal ten times as much with a pencil as with a gun. And if you're caught you don't go to jail, you just get fired. The bank you stole from doesn't even report what you did because it doesn't want to be publicly embarrassed. http://www.rgemonitor.com/financemarkets-monitor/252626/looting_the_vaults_at_the_central_banks.
3 comments:
Willie is off by a half a dozen zeros. :)
BS:
Not to be disagreeable, but I suspect if WS were asked today, he would rather be an investment banker than an accountant. The FBI reported during 2001 the average bank robbery netted about $16,000. If a decent sized securities fraud nets say, $1.6 billion, that's five more zeros, so WS would only be off by four zeros. Laugh. If you can, but it's tragic, not funny, that's what the US has come to.
We sent Wesley Snipes to prison and investment bankers to Washington as Treasury Secretaries. What a country.
...so WS would only be off by four zeros.
My bad, four zeros. ::roll eyes::
;P
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