When we created the website for Wall Street On Parade, it took us about 30 minutes to add a free plug-in function so that our readers could search the text of every article we have ever written. (See Search box in upper right-hand corner of our menu at the top of this website.) But at Wall Street’s top cop, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), if one wants to search corporate filings, one is limited to a four-year text search. This bizarre restriction inhibits investigative journalists from capably doing their job and connecting dots.
This might sound like a small complaint were it not part of a larger pattern of technological failures by the SEC which have allowed Wall Street firms to run amok for decades.
The biggest technological failure, of course, is the SEC’s inability to launch a Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) over the 83 years of the SEC’s existence in order to spot manipulative or illegal trades by some of the most highly sophisticated trading houses in the world. While JPMorgan brags about having “more software developers than Google, and more technologists than Microsoft,” and Goldman Sachs is hiring the best Russian coders, Wall Street’s top cop is still driving a horse and buggy.…
In April of 2014, Kidney spoke with NPR on the demoralization of public servants at the SEC. Kidney said: “Washington has become — and I think everybody knows it — a bathtub full of cash. As long as you just go in the bathtub you’re going to come out with cash stuck on you – if you’re at least a certain, have certain jobs and have certain roles. And that’s why the revolving door is such a problem. It’s cultural, it’s the culture of Washington, it’s the culture of Wall Street and it hollows out the civil service…”...
Watching the U.S. devolve into a third-world-level of corruption and cronyism is deeply painful for those who love their country. It’s time for those collective voices to demand a formal, independent Federal investigation of the SEC. No other industry in America has done more to bankrupt the U.S. than Wall Street and no other cop on the beat has done less to stop it....Wall Street On Parade
Technological Incompetence Appears to be Intentional at Wall Street’s Top Cop
Pam Martens and Russ Martens
2 comments:
"independent Federal investigation"
Which part of the bathtub is going to independtly investigate another part of the bathtub?
Too big to fail takes on an entirely new meaning.
"Bathtub": another metaphor....
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