NOT ENOUGH FBI AGENTS?

NOT ENOUGH FBI AGENTS? In my reactions to the current financial crisis, I have given weight to articles by people who dealt with the collapse of the saving and loan industry in the early 1990’s. It was from them that I took the conclusion that cleaning up the bad securities would have to be done one mortgage at a time. This article by William K. Black makes another comparison with the savings and loan crisis: “As late as 2007, the agency [the FBI] assigned only 120 investigators spread among 56 field offices to probe thousands of cases. More than eight times that number probed the S&L frauds, a far smaller epidemic.” I have posted (see here) that I thought that much of went wrong in the current crisis happened in plain sight, that the enormous risks were out in the open. However, if the savings and loan cleanup is used as a model, there has not been the same degree of after-the-fact investigation of possible wrong doing. Maybe there is agreement that it was all in the open and nobody understood it.