Bear Stearns Losses Lead To Arrest of 2 Executives
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The arrests of 2 Bear Stearns executives, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, showed the level of exposure that the large finance companies have to the mortgage crisis. When Bear Stearns finally admitted to the problems in their mortgage funds the company imploded.
These titans of Wall Street made some amazingly bad bets. The shareholders of the finance companies are now paying the price for it. The biggest danger is not exposing the bad moves in subprime financing. Heck, every company is facing these issues to some extent.
The big problem is the lying and hiding of the problem. When it comes out, people will go to jail and companies face the risk of serious fines.
The Bear Stearns indictments, handed down in New York, involve the managers of two hedge funds that invested in securities whose value was tied to subprime mortgages. Those are home loans with looser-than-normal credit standards, such as little or no down payment.
The government charges that Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin engaged in conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud to hide mounting losses in the funds from investors. Cioffi was also charged with insider trading. The two men, who were handcuffed and displayed to the news media, pleaded not guilty.
The funds collapsed when the mortgages they were linked to lost value, wiping out $1.4 billion in investor money. The government later forced Bear Stearns to sell itself to banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. after it nearly went bankrupt on mortgage-related losses. via the SFGate
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Comment by Mark Harrison on 21 June 2008:
> The two men, who were handcuffed and displayed to the news media,
… thus making it almost impossible for them to get a fair trial.
I don’t know about the USA any more, but here in the UK we still have this concept of “innocent until proven guilty”. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that any juror who has seen media pictures of a defendant in handcuffs is far more likely to vote “guilty”, because they have a mental model that says “this person is a criminal” even BEFORE they hear the first word of evidence.
So, good for media relations, good for “securing convictions”, pesky in that some of those convictions later prove to be bogus, the real criminals go free, innocent peoples’ lives are ruined, and the taxpayer picks up the compensation bill.