(The New Yorker - U.S.)

Internal Memorandum No. 8121b

ATTN: Employees of Goldman Sachs

We did it. Bottom of the ninth, down by three, bases loaded, and we cranked another grand slam to the moon. They may have shot Lennon, but nothing can kill the Beatles.

I admit things looked bleak for a minute there. We had to convert to a bank holding company and were forced to accept a taxpayer bailout. It felt un-American. Terribly unbanksmanly. But we accepted the money, knowing that we could magically weave it into a much larger mountain of money.(...)

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(The New York Times - U.S.)

A criminal saga that began in December with a string of superlativ es -- the largest, longest and most widespread Ponzi scheme in history -- ended the same way on Monday as Bernard L. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum for his crimes. Mr. Madoff, looking thinner and more haggard than when he pleaded guilty in March, stood impassively as Federal District Judge Denny Chin condemned his crimes as "extraordinarily evil" and imposed a sentence that was three times as long as the federal probation office suggested and more than 10 times as long as defense lawyers had requested.(...)

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Ex-finance minister Hirschson sentenced to 65 months in jail (Haaretz - Israel)

A Tel Aviv court on Wednesday sentenced former finance minister Abraham Hirschson to five years and five months in prison and a fine of NIS 450,000, for embezzling NIS 1.8 million from the national labor federation while he served as its chairman.

He returned NIS 570,000 in cash to the national labor federation on Tuesday, in addition to NIS 1.16 million in checks. (...)

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Fraud victims pour vitriol on Bernard Madoff (The Guardian - U.K.)

More than 100 former clients who lost money in the $65bn Ponzi scheme outline the devastation wreaked on their lives in statements to the judge ahead of sentencing. Victims of Bernard Madoff's $65bn (£47bn) fraud poured vitriol on the disgraced financier today as they outlined the devastation he wreaked on their lives. The judge handling the Madoff case received letters and emails from more than 100 former Madoff clients. Some urged the judge to sentence Madoff to life, at a hearing scheduled for 29 June. Others called him "a thief", "a monster", "a psychopathic, lying egomaniac".. (...)

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The F-World (Free Exchange - The Net)

One of the more unsatisfying aspects of the financial crisis is the lack of easy villains. Yet at a bloggers conference in Kansas City a few months back, Yves Smith dropped the F-bomb. She reckons that when the dust settles on this economic crisis it'll expose lots of criminal fraud. For example, is Dick Fuld guilty for going on TV and misrepresenting the financial health of Lehman? Are the credit-rating agencies guilty for allowing firms to shop for ratings? Are mortgage brokers guilty for encouraging people to take loans they could not pay back? Or perhaps the borrowers themselves are guilty. (...)

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Where's Our Scapegoat? (Slate - The Net)

By Sam Kean

We aren't eating shoe leather just yet, but in one way, people in the 1930s had it easier than we do today: They had a scapegoat. The stock market crash that began in October 1929--and continued for years, lest we forget--was the result of heady speculation on shaky assets, paid for with the Monopoly money that new, highly leveraged financial tools provided, all of it abetted by legal bribes to oversight agencies. Seems like yesterday. But unlike our predecessors, we lack a satisfying villain, despite the efforts of the press and President Obama to pillory unnamed "bankers" and metonymic "Wall Street greed." Forget our economic well-being for a minute; for our emotional health and happiness, we need someone to go down hard. We need Ivar Kreuger.

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Dear A.I.G., I Quit! (The New Yorker - U.S.)

The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group's financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.(...)

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