“Ferdinand Pecora, the savvy immigrant from Sicily who became a Manhattan prosecutor with a memory for facts and figures that proved the undoing of a Wall Street banking world gone berserk with greed and fraud.
In the early 1930’s, during the Great Depression, and under threat of subpoena, one tycoon after another, including J.P. Morgan Jr., was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee and grilled by Pecora, the committee’s chief counsel…
The revelations of the Pecora hearings and the public’s anger led to sweeping reform, reining in the high-handed, free-wheeling banking industry. Those reforms stabilized our financial world for half a century, until the titans of finance and friendly politicians began to dismantle them…”
In April 2009 after the stock market had collapsed by 50% once more, Bill Moyers spoke with economist Simon Johnson and Ferdinand Pecora biographer and legal scholar Michael Perino about the stark similarities of the 1930’s and our present times. Sadly, 5 years of QE and bank bailouts since 2009 have only served to stall necessary reforms and embolden destructive behaviors in the banking system. The discussion remains entirely on point to present times. The same players, same acts, same frauds…bankers are nothing if not consistent and predictable. Here is a direct video link to PART 1 and here is the link to PART 2.
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