Finance 3400
Zhongyi Liu
April 15, 2015
The Untouchable

As the of the financial core of the United States and even the world, the Wall Street always give public people a feeling that it is untouchable. After the financial crisis, not a single top Wall Street executive has been convicted and many people did not accept it. Why it happened? Should we blame weak laws, or did the U.S. Justice Department lack of effort? In public’s perspective, some leaders from Wall Street should take responsibility to this huge crisis. This Video “The Untouchable” is trying to investigated the inner reason of this phenomenon and let publics know more information behind this huge crisis. The video keeps asking the question again and again in the video: “why no criminal prosecution of Wall Street executives or major Wall Street firms for activities related to the financial crisis?” By listening the opinions from different groups such as due diligence, people from justice department or leaders in Wall Street, we can get deeper understanding of this crisis.
Mistakes always give us chance to learn from it and we can learn a lot from this financial crisis, and there are three major learnings for me from this video. First, never loosen the standard of your company. This videos give us a bad example which is Countrywide Company. Greed driven them loosen their standard and give loan to every customer even they do not have ability to pay it back. The main reason of this huge financial crisis is many companies loosen their standard like Countrywide. Many customers cannot pay the money back and make the capital chain break, tones of company bankruptcy. Once you make mistake like this, it is hard to pull it back.
Second, respect the law. Even many people think some leaders in Wall Street have criminal intend and should go to jail, there is no enough evidence to support it beyond a reasonable doubt. This video focus on some accusations raised by former Senator Ted Kaufman, the person who believe that people from Wall Street were guilty and need to go to jail. However, he failed even he had some evidence that somehow shows they have criminal intend. In the interview, the person from justice department also said that from personal’s perspective, he believed that they should be plenty guilty, however, we should respect the law because it is more objective than human’s mind.
Third, be honest. In the video, we can see that many due diligence people came out and talked about their experience, even their fault is critical in this crisis but in my opinion, the environment force all due diligence people did wrong thing so no one should be blamed. For example, your competitor loosen their standard and have more business, if you do not do this, you will beaten by your competitor. The important thing is know we did not do the right thing and have the brave to admit it after bad things happened. Be an honest person is the most important lesson I learned from this video. After the video, there is another question we need to think of: Why was anyone prostituted? Many people think the reason of this huge financial crisis is the rotten to the core of our financial institution. The booming developing make people in the financial industry thought making money is very easy and they should make a huge of money so they loosen their standard and break some rules. The white collar crime is hard to convict guilty so it drive many people to take the risk of it, especially after you have several years’ experience in your job position.