Courtesy of Pam Martens.
The underlying theme that Wall Street’s Federal regulators have become whores for the industry permeates most of the well-researched books that have been written about Wall Street over the past decade. But no book has connected the dots to the nuances and subtleties of how this whoring works as effectively as Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street.
Written by Carmen Segarra, the petite lawyer turned bank examiner turned whistleblower turned one-woman swat team, the 340-page tome takes the reader along on her gut-wrenching workdays for an entire seven months inside one of the most powerful and corrupted watchdogs of the powerful and corrupted players on Wall Street – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (The days were literally gut-wrenching. Segarra reports that after months of being alternately gas-lighted and bullied at the New York Fed to whip her into the ranks of the corrupted, she had to go to a gastroenterologist and learned her stomach lining was gone.) She soldiered through her painful stomach ailments and secretly tape-recorded 46 hours of conversations between New York Fed officials and Goldman Sachs. After being fired for refusing to soften her examination opinion on Goldman Sachs, Segarra released the tapes to ProPublica and the radio program This American Life and the story went viral from there.
The book exquisitely confirms, from a Wall Street veteran educated at Harvard, Columbia and Cornell Law, what Wall Street On Parade has been telling our readers for years – the New York Fed is at the core of Wall Street’s corrupt model. (See “Related Articles” below.)
In a nutshell, the whoring works like this. There are huge financial incentives to go along, get along, and keep your mouth shut about fraud. The financial incentives encompass both the salary, pension and benefits at the New York Fed as well as the high-paying job waiting for you at a Wall Street bank or Wall Street law firm if you show you are a “team player.” Segarra calls this process FUMU – “f**k up, move up.”
Segarra explains the benefits of keeping your mouth shut as follows:
“twenty days of vacation plus federal holidays, every other Friday off, and two pensions plans – a 401(k) with matching, plus an additional defined-benefits pension plan that would pay your full salary. And don’t forget the generous six-figure salary and five-figure bonus that was comparable to what you would receive at a private-sector bank outside the sales jobs areas. All that for a nine-to-five job – a true rarity in banking outside the secretarial and menial jobs. Plus, the freedom to add a second job on the side if you were willing to work and use your free time for it – of which you had plenty, as no one was expected to do much in the way of real or meaningful work. All you had to do was adapt to the Fed way of doing things.”
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