Wall Street’s untouchables
With the economy showing slow but steady signs of recovery, now is as good a time as any to look back on the recent past, in a Passionate Eye re-airing of a PBS Frontline documentary that first aired in May, The Untouchables.
It’s must-see viewing for anyone who wonders how so many Wall Street decision-makers eluded criminal prosecution at the time, despite what the program makers say is credible evidence that brokers knowingly sold toxic mortgage loans to unsuspecting investors.
The program makers query U.S. federal prosecutors, Justice Department officials and whistleblowers themselves to find out why, if so many knew what was going on and why, no one bothered to do anything about it.
The Untouchables is talky, and not everyone will buy the premise that major investment firms’ so-called “best people” are as crafty and conniving as conspiracy theorists and program producers make them out to be. They may just be unworldly, ignorant, unsophisticated and inefficient – as Jon Stewart pointedly noted on The Daily Show at the time, “You don’t have ‘best people.’ ”
The Untouchables is absorbing just the same. It looks, sounds and feels like a Hollywood feature film — Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, updated for the post-tech-bubble age of computerized day trades, derivatives and credit swaps, where short-selling often means selling investors short.
Numbers can be tedious for the average TV watcher, but some of the numbers bandied about in The Untouchables are eye-opening. The Economist reported in 2011, for example, that the over-the-counter derivative market exceeded $600 trillion, when the actual value was closer to $21 trillion.
To put that figure in perspective – don’t worry, you won’t see $1 trillion in your lifetime – the budget for all U.S. government expenditure in 2012 was $3.5 trillion, according to The Economist, while the current value of the U.S. stock market is $23 trillion, give or take.
“Fraud was the F-word, or the Fbomb,” a financial supervisor, who examined the quality of loans for investment banks like Bear Stearns, says in the program. “You didn’t use that word. By your terms, and by my terms, yes, it was fraud. By the (financial industry’s) terms, it was something else.”
Fool’s gold, perhaps. The Untouchables is riveting viewing, whether for the first time or as a repeat. After all, those who cannot, or will not, remember the past, even the recent past, are condemned to … well, you know the rest. (Saturday, CBC News Network – 8 p.m., 11 p.m.)
After beating the Bruins in a triple overtime thriller, the Blackhawks are back on home ice for Game 2 of the Stanley Cup final, live from the United Center in Chicago. (CBC – 6 p.m.)