Fraud has long been at the heart of the finance business

But folks, this is ridiculous.

Time for Truth: Three Card Monte is for Suckers 

Tuesday, 03/16/2010 - 12:50 pm 

by Eliot Spitzer and William Black

Eliot Spitzer and William Black call for an immediate Congressional investigation of Lehman’s accounting deception and the release of relevant emails and internal documents.

In December, we argued the urgent need to make public A.I.G.’s emails and “key internal accounting documents and financial models.” A.I.G.’s schemes were at the center of the economic meltdown. Three months later, a year-long report by court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas makes it abundantly clear why such investigations are critical to the recovery of our financial system. Every time someone takes a serious look, a new scandal emerges.

The damning 2,200-page report, released last Friday, examines the reasons behind Lehman’s failure in September 2008. It reveals on and off balance-sheet accounting practices the firm’s managers used to deceive the public about Lehman’s true financial condition. Our investigations have shown for years that accounting is the “weapon of choice” for financial deception. Valukas’s findings reveal how Lehman used $50 billion in “repo” loans to fool investors into thinking that it was on sound financial footing. As our December co-author Frank Partnoy recently explained as part of a major report of the Roosevelt Institute, “Make Markets Be Markets“, such abusive off-balance accounting was and is endemic. It was a major cause of the financial crisis, and it will lead to future crises. more