James Chanos Quotes
While short sellers probably will never be popular on Wall Street, they often are the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys!
Chanos, James W. "Statement of James W. Chanos." Roundtable on Hedge Funds, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 14 May 2003.
The then attorney general had begun a series of investigation which discovered that most of the major Wall Street brokerage houses were engaged in systematic frauds to cheat small investors. One dramatic fraud he uncovered was that the research expert analysts of major firms would recommend the stock of businesses that their firm was doing investment banking for even when they knew that the companies were not doing well or were even in deep financial trouble. See {627544}.
At the time, the financial industry spent more money for lobbyists and campaign contributions than any other sector of the economy. The result is that they had extraordinary access to and influence upon members of Congress and their staffs, that more often than not, the actually drafted the language for laws, amendments and regulations and then les the strategy to pass the legislation or finalize the rule. Moreso than any other industry, they wrote their own rules. Even after the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession where there was a public outcry for reform, the Dodd Frank legislation was influenced by the industry and after passage most of the rules and interpretations were written by the industry or greatly influenced by them.
While not every person in the stock market was dishonest, a large number were, and the system itself was inherently unfair and disadvantaged the average investor. Despite the many reforms attempted over the years, as the 2008 meltdown proved, the same problem was still with us. Capone was essentially right then and even today.
Marcopolos had discovered the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme Fraud 9 years before the government discovered the largest consumer fraud ($68 billion) in American financial history. He repeatedly sent warnings and explanations to the SEC investigators, most of which turned out to be exactly right. They ignored all of it I an era of deregulation, and never even investigated Madoff to see if there might be anything amiss.
Greenspan was not the amoral fool that this quotation makes him seem. Despite the fact that he was the most important financial officer of the country, he had an ideological faith that a free market was self-corrective in a democracy. The financial industry would police itself he believed. He also trusted the self interest of the financial corporations to restrain them from getting too greedy -- {637989}. He and many others were wrong and most Americans paid the price.
James S. Chanos is an American investment manager. He is president and founder of Kynikos Associates, a New York City registered investment advisor focused on short selling. A noted art collector, he appeared on the BBC Four documentary The Banker's Guide to Art.
