Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil writes: The guilty pleas last week by two former Credit Suisse Group (CS) traders, on charges of falsifying their company’s asset values, revive an age-old question: How dumb do you have to be to get criminally convicted for a fraud you committed while working at a bank deemed too big to fail?
It’s a shame the television series “America’s Dumbest Criminals” went off the air more than a decade ago, because the cases of Salmaan Siddiqui, 36, and David Higgs, 42, would have provided wonderful fodder as an example of high finance gone feloniously brain-dead. Sure, their stories might not have the same mainstream appeal as, say, the video of a gun-wielding robber at a convenience store who wore a see-through plastic bag over his head as a disguise.
Still, their forays into illegality were so painfully dimwitted they deserve to be celebrated, if only to distract us from a more unnerving aspect of their story: In all probability, lots of other bankers committed the exact same kinds of acts during the financial crisis. And the vast majority of those who did will never be prosecuted, mainly because they weren’t so dense about the way they did it.
Imagine this: You are a Wall Street trader during the summer of 2007, specializing in complex mortgage bonds that no human being is capable of fully understanding. What little you do grasp about these bonds is that if their values go down too much, your year-end bonus won’t be as high as you want it to be….
Wait,wait...it gets even better. Check out http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-10/world-s-dumbest-traders-were-at-credit-suisse-commentary-by-jonathan-weil.html
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