more on the banks as bad guys

Fastow a Key for Plaintiffs in Bank Suits - New York Times: "Mr. Fastow, Enron’s former chief financial officer, was sentenced last week to six years in jail for stealing from Enron and devising schemes to deceive investors about the energy company’s true financial condition. In his last weeks of freedom, he spent long days giving plaintiffs’ lawyers his account of the role that banks played in helping Enron disguise how much debt and how little cash it had.
Lawyers have already won settlements for $7.3 billion of the $40 billion investors claim they lost in Enron’s collapse. Most of that money has come from banks, like J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Seven other banks have not settled."

It's all starting to shake out, about how the banks and their loss of principle (there may be a pun there) may be the root cause of a lot of our society's current problems. Our friend Callahan on the next street is coming at the bank problem from a different angle, with the help of Becky Gaylord.