Bringing Broken-Windows Policing to Wall Street
In ‘93 I joined a Wall Street that was going out of style, a Wall Street where graying partners were served lunches on fine china at their desks by waiters. I joined a Wall Street that celebrated birthdays with strippers on the trading floor and successes with Cuban cigars.
.. Employees were required to keep their money in the company, so if the firm failed, everyone failed, resulting in a degree of self-policing.
.. What is the financial equivalent of rounding up the squeegee men, graffiti artists, and those smoking joints in front of the police station? It means going after the easy targets, the transparent businesses where the abuses were well documented.
Doing so has resulted in a bevy of investigations and scandals named after acronyms: LIBOR, FXfix, and ISDAfix.
.. As one trader from the FXfix case was found saying, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”