Image via CrunchBase
Nomi Prins - former managing director of Goldman Sachs and head of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London - is saying the same thing that financial bloggers have been saying: The giant banks are manipulating their books to make themselves look profitable.
In fact, Prins says that this might be worse than the fraud which occurred at Enron:
Enron was the financial scandal that kicked off the decade: a giant energy trading company that appeared to be doing brilliantly—until we finally noticed that it wasn’t. It’s largely been forgotten given the wreckage that followed, and that’s too bad: we may be repeating those mistakes, on a far larger scale.
Specifically, as the largest Wall Street banks return to profitability—in some cases, breaking records—they say everything is rosy. They’re lining up to pay back their TARP money and asking Washington to back off. But why are they doing so well? Remember that Enron got away with their illegalities so long because their financials were so complicated that not even the analysts paid to monitor the Houston-based trading giant could cogently explain how they were making so much money.
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