Need for Economic Crimes’ Nuremberg-Type Trials

I prefer the Spanish word “perogrullada” to its English equivalent: truism or platitude.  During my youth we had something closer in meaning to perogrullada when we would confront someone expressing the obvious, saying “no kidding, Dick Tracy!” [Dick Tracy was then a very popular comic strip detective and crime solver.]

Well, the great minds here in America are now telling us that a double-dip recession is beginning to look more as a probability than a possibility.  And I say… no kidding, Dick Tracy!  We actually never came out of the recession, never mind some intermittent data that only served to confuse and mask the true state of most world economies, particularly those in much of the Western World.  How can any student of economics knowing, or even guessing, that there were trillions of dollars of overvalued assets and phony paper still in the books of many major world banks, disregard it as a non-event?  Depending on how many trillion are inflating the books, recession will stay with us, particularly in much of Europe and the United States, for as long as a decade.

Although some of the latter day economic crimes are global in nature and deserve to be tried by an international tribunal, many nations are not quite yet prepared to grant authority on complex economic matters to an international body, such as the International Court at The Hague.  The United States, a nation where much of the techno-financial crimes originated, would never consent to such scrutiny, and the likely indictment of many of its most prominent leaders in banking, finance and politics. No one would expect such masochism to take place for crime which took place, and was allowed at the apex of American economic and political power.

More