Dylan Ratigan & Eliot Spitzer plainly explain the fraud that occurred at Lehman. Ratigan hands Spitzer collateral (a trash can), and Spitzer hands Ratigan cash. Lehman “pawned” its garbage in exchange for short-term loans to spruce up the quarterly books with “more cash, less trash.” This is the “repo 105” fraud everyone is talking about since the release of the bankruptcy examiner’s report. Please watch:
CEO Dick Fuld alone made half a billion bucks off this fraud. He remains a free man today. As Spitzer said, the accounting firm Ernst & Young, the Fed, and the Treasury were also involved in this fraud.
Ratigan: “This report comes just short of suggesting this is by no means an accident but instead one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated by a group of people, and enabled by the US government.”
And Spitzer concludes: “there is no doubt civil cases will be brought. We had a failure of CEO, the CFO, the accountants, and indeed the regulators, the Fed and the Treasury, that were inside these banks, and the question has to be asked: where were they?”