Well, you know, the OP/ED page of the New York Times is close to the top of that list, but Joe Nocera just called for prosecutions in the MF Global matter:

It’s sure starting to look as if Jon Corzine is going to get away with it.

By now, it has been well established that Corzine’s former firm, MF Global, committed the sin of sins for a broker-dealer. In late October, during the final, desperate days before it entered bankruptcy proceedings, its executives took money from segregated customer accounts — money that belonged not to MF Global but to the farmers and commodities traders that were its clients — and used it to prop up its rapidly collapsing business. Nor was this petty cash: of the $6.9 billion in customer assets that MF Global held, a stunning $1.6 billion is missing. There is virtually no chance that the full amount will ever be recovered.

Let’s not mince words here. These executives committed a crime. Virtually every knowing violation of the Commodities Exchange Act is a crime, but taking money from segregated customer accounts is at the top of the list. And for good reason. Customer money is supposed to be sacrosanct. If a broker-dealer goes bankrupt, the segregated accounts are supposed to remain safe, a little like the way bank deposits remain protected if a bank goes under. Indeed, customers need to be able to trust the fact that their money is segregated and protected at all times. Otherwise, the markets can’t function.

Yet, a few weeks ago, Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess, who have done a remarkable job covering the MF Global bankruptcy for The Times, wrote an article suggesting that prosecutors were having trouble putting together a criminal case against anyone at MF Global. So far, wrote Ahmed and Protess, they’d been “unable to find a smoking gun.” In fact, they continued, “a number of federal prosecutors have expressed doubts” that MF Global “intentionally misused customer money.” Apparently, the current theory is that it was all just a big accident, the chaos of those final days causing the firm’s executives to tap into customer funds without realizing it.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes. Of course there isn’t a smoking gun. As a general rule, financial professionals tend not to write e-mails that say, “Hey, we’re desperate. Let’s break into the customer accounts!” And, of course, they are always going to say it was unintentional. They are saying it already, starting with Corzine, who told Congress last year that “there was no intention to violate segregation rules.”

He’s right.

He’s also right that the failure to prosecute is an assault on the idea of the rule of law.

It’s not a particularly surprising conclusion to draw, but the fact that it’s appearing in the New York times is a big deal.

Once again, the banks sold bad paper, in this case, credit card debts that they knew were not accurate and, and once again, Matt Taibbi has a distills the essence of the matter:

In a story that should be getting lots of attention, American Banker has released an excellent and disturbing exposé of J.P. Morgan Chase’s credit card services division, relying on multiple current and former Chase employees. One of them, Linda Almonte, is a whistleblower whom I’ve known since last September; I’m working on a recount of her story for my next book.

………

The Cliff’s Notes version of the story goes something like this: Late in 2009, Chase’s credit card services division sold a parcel of nearly $200 million worth of credit card judgments to a debt collector at a discount. This common practice in the credit-card industry is a little like a bookie selling the outstanding debts of his delinquent gamblers to a leg-breaker for 25 cents on the dollar. If the leg-breaker gets half the delinquents to pay, the deal works out for both sides — the bookie gets 25 percent of money he wasn’t going to collect, and the leg-breaker makes a 100 percent profit.

Only they did not do even the barest due diligence:

Linda [Almonte] subsequently found an enormous range of errors. Some judgments, she told me, were not judgments at all. In some cases, she said, Chase actually owed the customer money.

When she brought these concerns to her superiors, what do you think their response was? They told her and others to shut up and just sell the stuff anyway. Her boss, Jason Lazinbat, allegedly told her “she had better go along with the plan to sell the misrepresented asset.”

Think of the consequences of this: because Chase was so anxious to make money off this debt sale, countless credit card borrowers would now have collection agents chasing them for money they did not owe. The debt-buyer, too, was victimized by being sold accounts it could not collect on. It is almost impossible to estimate how many man-hours of pointless court proceedings would be lost because of this decision.

You know, this sounds familiar. Just like the foreclosure fraud.

In fact, it sounds like a pattern, a, “pattern of racketeering,” as in RICO, and the burden of proof in RICO, particularly for asset forfeiture, is not that high.

How about it, Barack?

It’s something that you can do in your 2^nd term, and you don’t need Congressional approval to do this.

So, Greg Smith, who ran equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Goldman Sachs, has resigned today.

Normally, this would not be particularly newsworthy, except for the fact that he published his separation letter on the OP/ED page of the New York Times:

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

Truth be told, I’m not impressed.

This guy as been a Vampire Squidling for over a decade, so I see this as kind of self serving.

If he were claiming law breaking, it would mean something, but he is mostly complaining how the brokers trash talk:

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

He’s not claiming any law breaking (Yeah, right), just that there is a insane macho culture at Goldman that sees the clients more as marks than as partners in success.

How the f%$# can you work at a f%$#ing brokerage for ten f%$#ing years, and not f%$#ing realize that it’s a f%$#ing testosterone f%$#ing hormone filled f%$#ing cesspool after being there two f%$#ing weeks hours.

Seriously, just f%$#!

Whoever wrote, “Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader,” got the crux of the matter.

I will issue a correction if this guy does something like working for a regulator, but my guess is that this is all about providing himself plausible deniability, or possibly pimping a book, or maybe he’s hanging out his own shingle.

Here’s a thousand years on what I’m seeing:

Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader

H/t FT/Alphavill for the Pic

[update]Matt Taibbi thinks that this guy is for real, so if you want want an opposing opinion, and I think that it is well argued, go read.