Yesterday’s NYT had a couple of great pieces buried deep in the business section. First, it turns out that the current economic meltdown was actually explained in advance by an academic paper with the perfect title: Looting. And then there’s the profile of Bernie Madoff’s lawyer, Ira Sorkin, who was told by one of Madoff’s victims
“As one Jew to another, I deeply regret that the Sorkin family did not perish in the Nazi death camps.”
Both well worth reading.
The “Looting” link has extra shit in the address that disables the link.
Heh, I pointed that out, too, but in the post below this one by mistake. No coffee yet.
It’s a good article. Depressing. Also, wasn’t the Silverado bank one of those that messed everything up back then? Owned by a Bush brother?
People who despise defense lawyers aren’t seeing the big picture.
Sorkin explains why he defends these people perfectly in the final paragraph of the Madoff article (and in the paragraph in the middle that begins with “That’s a great question…”)
So the wonders of a Free Market don’t work if the losses are socialized, removing the need for prudent risk management from the act of lending because the lenders know that their losses will be covered? Leading them to make loans to people with no money, or companies with no assets, or to people who give their return address as the Cayman islands or “a park bench down by the ferry terminal” on the loan application, and then sell off those loans as bundled derivatives to mutual funds that your grandma invests all her retirement money in?
Makes sense.
Link fixed. Sorry.
I always suspected the invisible hand was going to bitch slap me.
Burn!
Urgutha Forka, of course defense lawyers have their place, everyone has a right to council, HOWEVER this slimy prick’s family benefited from Madoff’s scheme. His son’s received nearly a million dollars from Madoff’s firm. Of course he’s going to bat for him, it seems that he made a considerable down payment on his legal fees.
Mr. Sorkin works for a firm called Dickstein Shapiro. How fitting.
Is there ever going to be a post explaining why the discussion of the criminal records of stranger staff is a forbidden topic, but the use of such records to write stories for the stranger about other people in Seattle is encouraged?
The whole premise is exploiting people’s greed. While I admit there are charities that wanted to maximise their investments for good causes, they too expected more than was wise or prudent. The rest of us “trusted” the system to police itself, which in hindsight also seems irresponsible. Lesson learned? Too much of this is human fraility and likely will repeat itself again in the future.
Sure, @9:
When you can prove members of The Stranger looted several tens of millions (we’ll keep the bar low, just for you) from unsuspecting investors, or from the government, or whomever, THEN we’ll start taking your “accusations” seriously.
If, in the meantime, the best you can come up with is a handful of non-moving traffic violations, my advice would be to STFUA.
I love ECB, but she should really post something addressing her recent shoplifting charge. The trolls will just get worse if she doesn’t. She seems bubble-brained sometimes so I would believe it was an accident. Forgetting to pay for a bottle of wine isn’t any more unbelievable than leaving your bike on the bus multiple times or accidently taking a bus to West Seattle. (I’m not being insulting – I can be bubble-brained too.)
@8,
As long as it’s directed at Sorkin personally, and not defense lawyers in general, then I’ve got no problem with that!
@12, since when does feeding the trolls ever result in them going away?
Unless we are somehow impacted (and we are not), this is none of our business.
@14,
How am I impacted by Madoff? How am I impacted by a fraternity brawl? The story here isn’t what she did, its that The Stranger doesn’t want transparency, but demand it from other people, or frame things in such a way that the lack of transparency or comment is somehow an admission of guilt or wrong doing.
I think the larger ECB point is: if the person presenting “facts” to you is a demonstrated liar & thief, then you have the right to not believe the “facts” they present.
Does anyone believe a word Bush/Rove/Cheney/DeLay/Abramoff/Libby/Madoff/Stamford (et al) say? No, and with good reason.
Maybe ECB is following the Jean Enerson path to media stardom!
Somebody is grumpy today. What’s the matter, Erica never responded to your love letters?
@15 – how are you impacted? read this month’s upcoming issue of Vanity Fair. The unregulated hedge funds, added to Icelandic banks, basically overspeculated the market.
oh, and @6 for the win.
Can we bring back public whippings? I’d like to see bankers get one line of the lash for each thousand dollars their company lost. Hell, we can be charitable and give ’em just one hit for each million dollars that went poof. It’d probably still be enough to kill them, and I’m not too fussed about that.
The Invisible Hand had a bad day in the Invisible Machine Shop, and it might not ever play the Invisible Banjo again.
seems as if the feds should be able to recover the fees that the bankers siphoned off – if they had the will.
Yes Erica please explain the stealing of a cheap ass bottle of wine to us. You feel free to defame people without even an ounce of concern about wether or not you have reported the truth. Worse yet the Stranger doesn’t require the truth. Rot.