Daily Archives: October 3, 2013

Sorkin’s Paradox: Elite Bank Officers are “Worse” than “Repugnant” but Never Criminal

By William K. Black

This is the third installment in my Sorkin Saga.  The saga was prompted by Andrew Ross Sorkin’s (ARS) video in which he “outed” himself as the leader of an undercover effort by the journalists of the New York Time’s “Dealbook” and CNBC to discover and “out” the “criminal element” among the elite bankers.  Here is the key passage from his video.

“If there’s one question that I get just about more than any other, ‘So why didn’t anybody go to jail, and did nobody try?’ And there’s an answer to that too.

A lot of people had an incentive to try to find a way to bring not justice, but to put people away.  Prosecutors, law enforcement, journalists; it would have been a better story.  But for the last five years we’ve tried, all of us have tried, to find that criminal element.  And while things happened that were upsetting and frustrating and unethical and immoral sadly, it may not have been criminal.”

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