Money and Finance
- Charlie Munger On Opportunity Costs
From the 2005-2013 collection of Munger notes: I just wanted to do the best I could reasonably do with the talent, time and resources I had available. That’s what I was doing then and now. Everything is based on opportunity costs. Academia has done...
- Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep In Criminally Charging Its Ex-programmer?
A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of...
- Iran Sentences Bank Fraudsters To Death
Maybe the judges read Jason Zweig’s article from over the weekend. An Iranian court has sentenced four people to death for their role in a $2.8bn bank fraud, in a ruling that is set to intensify the battle between president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and...
- A Con Man Who Lives Between Truth And Fiction - By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Found via Santangel’s Review. “I’m a proven liar. Don’t believe anything I say.” That was what Samuel Israel III told me last week. He is the hedge fund manager convicted of running a $450 million Ponzi scheme who faked his own suicide in the...
- Special Report: The Watchdogs That Didn't Bark
Found via The Big Picture. (Reuters) - Four years after the banking system nearly collapsed from reckless mortgage lending, federal prosecutors have stayed on the sidelines, even as judges around the country are pointing fingers at possible wrongdoing....
Money and Finance
Serving Life for This? - By Nicholas Kristof
So you’re a judge, and Sharanda P. Jones comes before you for sentencing for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.
She’s a 32-year-old mom with a 9-year-old daughter and no prior arrests, but she has been caught up in a drug sweep that has led to 105 arrests in her Texas town. Everyone arrested is black.
There are no drugs found on Jones, but her supposed co-conspirators testify against her in exchange for reduced sentences. The whole case is dubious, but she has been convicted. What’s your sentence?
You have little choice. Given the presumptions of the case, she gets a mandatory minimum sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Jump to today and already Jones has spent 14 years in prison and is expected to die behind bars — for a first offense.
At a time when America has been slashing preschool programs, we have also been spending vast sums to incarcerate thousands of nonviolent offenders in life sentences without any possibility of parole. These cases underscore that our mass incarceration experiment has resulted in monstrous injustice and waste — a waste of tax dollars and of human lives.
Judges and prison officials are rebelling at the injustice of our justice system. Here’s what Judge James R. Spencer, a federal district judge, said when sentencing a former F.B.I. informant to life without parole for selling crack cocaine to support his own addiction: “A life sentence for what you have done in this case is ridiculous; it is a travesty.”
But federal law on mandatory minimums left Judge Spencer no leeway. He added: “I don’t agree with it, either. And I want the world and the record to be clear on that. This is just silly.”
- Charlie Munger On Opportunity Costs
From the 2005-2013 collection of Munger notes: I just wanted to do the best I could reasonably do with the talent, time and resources I had available. That’s what I was doing then and now. Everything is based on opportunity costs. Academia has done...
- Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep In Criminally Charging Its Ex-programmer?
A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of...
- Iran Sentences Bank Fraudsters To Death
Maybe the judges read Jason Zweig’s article from over the weekend. An Iranian court has sentenced four people to death for their role in a $2.8bn bank fraud, in a ruling that is set to intensify the battle between president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and...
- A Con Man Who Lives Between Truth And Fiction - By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Found via Santangel’s Review. “I’m a proven liar. Don’t believe anything I say.” That was what Samuel Israel III told me last week. He is the hedge fund manager convicted of running a $450 million Ponzi scheme who faked his own suicide in the...
- Special Report: The Watchdogs That Didn't Bark
Found via The Big Picture. (Reuters) - Four years after the banking system nearly collapsed from reckless mortgage lending, federal prosecutors have stayed on the sidelines, even as judges around the country are pointing fingers at possible wrongdoing....