Gee, how come all this didn't happen a year ago - or two?

“News has surfaced that investment banks based in the United States have funded firms that created the financial indexes and other information needed to trade against the possibility of a sovereign default overseas—after selling debt to those countries in a way that kept that debt secret from the public,” Rep. Maloney said. “These reports, if true, are a shocking echo of the financial crisis that faced the U.S. in 2008—whose reverberations are still being felt today, in the worst recession in decades.”

No really?

You mean just like those wonderful "CDOs" that Goldman (and others) created that were in fact fully synthetic instruments and which came into being ONLY because someone wanted to SHORT your house?

Exactly why weren't these instruments banned when traded "in the dark"?

Off-balance sheet?  ENRON didn't make clear what happens when people hide things?  After all, nobody ever hides good news, right?

Carolyn, it's nice to hear you come out for this sort of hearing.

But this leaves open the question about the raw theft and blatant destruction that the fine "firms" headquartered and operating in New York - right up your back yard - are and have been promulgating, and why it is that there hasn't been any serious attempt to put a stop to it - until now.

Indeed, the same BS games are still going on today.  Wells Fargo and Citibank both have well over one trillion dollars off balance sheet in "God knows whats", worth God knows even less, and investors have exactly no knowledge of precisely what sort of trash is in there.

Municipal governments?  Jefferson County Alabama anyone?  How many more Jefferson County's are there?  We know these sorts of "deals" were written literally everywhere, and that in at least one case the underlying bond issue allegedly "protected" was never made, so this deal was nothing other than a raw bet on interest rates - made by a municipal government that was goaded into it by these very same banks.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house—you create an incentive to burn down the house.”

It's only insurance Carolyn if the person who wrote the policy can pay and the buyer has an insurable interest.

If the seller can't pay because they don't have the money or the buyer doesn't have an insurable interest, it's either a garden-variety scam or an inducement to commit financial arson.  When the latter is done "off exchange" where the trades are not made public and accessible then the incentives for someone to run around with a can of gasoline become nearly insurmountable.

Perhaps the fine Congresswoman can explain why is it that nobody's in jail for this yet - and why our government still allows this BS to continue.