Student Researcher: Demarco Butts
Faculty Evaluator: William Du Bois, Ph.D.
Southwest Minnesota State University
Breathtaking corruption overran the U.S lending industry and led to the economic crisis.
Credit agencies committed out and out fraud. Lenders negligently made risky loans that couldn’t possibly be good business. But everybody was doing it so nobody thought they’d ever get caught. Mike Francis an executive director of Morgan Stanley felt bad about the risky loans being packaged to investors: “We did it because everybody else was doing it. We almost couldn’t produce enough to keep the appetite of the investors happy.” Credit rating agencies, investment firms and banks were all involved in a colossal fraud. The mainstream press largely missed the story of how Wall Street drove that corruption. Deceptive practices and fraud were perpetrated on borrowers by companies we were told by our government we could trust.
“Boiler Room: The business press is missing the crooked heart of the credit crisis”
Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review. The Audit — September / October 2008
http://www.cjr.org/essay/boiler_room.php?page=all