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Red Queen has been thinking about parity:

If you or I were to rob a bank (no guns, no violence, just a scary note and the threat of violence) we’d be facing some serious jail time. But if you are a banker and you rob the treasury department with threats of violently collapsing the entire world economy, you don’t get jail time. You get TARP money. And you still get to hand out annual bonuses and bitch about salary caps.

Now if you or I had to apply for government assistance, there would be some serious investigation into our finances. If you own a car worth more than a couple thousand bucks ($5000 I think), you have to sell it and use up that money first. If you have stocks or bonds or a 401k even a prepaid funeral plan, you have to use that up first. Then maybe you can get some kind of government help. Maybe.

But if you’re a banker, and you’ve run your company into the ground, your own assets are safe. The government will not require you to sell off your vacation house and pump the proceeds back into the bank before writing a check. They won’t even require salary cuts or end bonuses (who the fuck gives out annual bonuses at failing companies anyways?)

What is absolutely fascinating to me are the cases in between– like Kazutsugi Nami, a Japanese businessman/swindler who invented a “quasi-currency” called “Enten” (円天=”money from heaven”), and after eight years of this, recently got arrested on accusations of defrauding thousands of investors of at least $1 billion (and possibly as much as $2 billion).

You can only stand slackjawed at the awesome chutzpah of sharks like this:

Moments before his arrest in front of the TV cameras, Nami was unrepentant as he held court over breakfast in a restaurant near his Tokyo office.

“Please shoot the face of the biggest conman in history,” he said, sipping from a glass of beer at 5.30am. “Time will tell if I’m a conman or a swindler. I’m leading 50,000 people. Can they charge a company this big with fraud?”

Shortly before being led away by police, he was asked if he felt sorry for his cheated investors. “No. I have put my life at stake,” he said. “Why do I have to apologise? I’m the poorest victim. Nobody lost more than I did. You should be aware that high returns come with a high risk.”

So Red Queen is right, people get locked up for stealing chewing gum but get a private island nation if they get some buddies together to steal seven or eight hundred billion dollars at a time. What’s interesting to me is that, in this new age of economic crapitude, evidently even stealing a mere billion dollars isn’t enough to save you from the slammer.

(In truth, I think that Nami’s problem wasn’t that he wasn’t scamming enough money. Even as paltry a sum as a billion dollars is surely enough to protect you, if you do it right. It’s just that that he tried to go it on his own. Gotta go through the family. If he’d funneled just 5% of that money into lobbyists, he’d still be a free man.)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Economy Blues, Orientalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.