Eliot Spitzer Calls It Quits

Posted by guest, Mar 12, 2008 1:12PM

How long til Silda is out of there? Seriously, have some F'ing pride and walk. Hopefully she is just holding out for the $s.

-Nominate me

Posted by guest, Mar 12, 2008 1:13PM

OK he's gone and everyone is happy. But the interesting issue is how he was caught: his banks ratted him out for unusual cash and wire transactions.

Was Spitzer a good friend of banks? No. He seems to have thought he was regulating them away from the subprime mess, only to have the feds came along and preempt his jurisdiction thanks to a recent Supreme Court case. See for example the article that appeared in Slate back in January:

http://www.slate.com/id/2182709

"......What the OCC [one of the federal bank regulatory agencies] took to be shortsighted consumer-protection laws laden with hidden costs turned out to be prescient market-correcting reforms. It's impossible, of course, to know for sure what might have happened had the OCC stayed its hand. Subprime lenders have lobbied hard against the state laws, and the incipient legislation could have been strangled in its infancy anyway. But the bottom line is that, had the state laws been permitted to go into effect, investors would now be sitting on fewer subprime loans that will never be repaid. The subprime catastrophe might have been more like a mini-crisis....." For more law on this issue see http://www.occ.treas.gov/law/CourtDecision.htm

The Slate article is debatable to say the least and applies to other states in addition to New York. Whether the banks were out to get Spitzer depends on how paranoid and anti-bank you may be. Still, there is reason to look a bit deeper into what the federal government was doing wiretapping a sitting governor with a hypocracy problem under a statute designed to stop terrorist financing, who put them up to it, and why.

Posted by guest, Mar 12, 2008 1:21PM

Letterman was wondering if it's too early to hit on Mrs. Spitzer.

Conan had the best line of all: "He violated our trust, he violated his beliefs, and apparently he violated someone named 'Kristen'".

Posted by guest, Mar 12, 2008 1:30PM

@1:!3 - "..his banks ratted him out for unusual cash and wire transactions"

Funny thing is - if the banks DIDN't rat out suspicious activities of this sort, HE would be the first to go after them for aiding money-laundering, followed by extortion of a few billion dollars in 'settlement' (funny how paying the mafia to stay quiet is now called 'settlement'!)

Posted by diablo, Mar 12, 2008 1:39PM

My bank ratted on me. I won. Spitzer acted like an idiot, however. He should have known better. When you are a target and the computers (banks and government) are set to monitor you (data mining), you better be clean.