More jailtime for white collars during crises?
A lot of people feel that sentences for white collar criminals are much more lenient than sentences for other types of crime. Perhaps with the recent economic downturn and the massive anger with greedy bankers and financial wizards, that is about to change. The NY Times reports that nearly seven years after National Century Financial Enterprises collapsed in a $2.9 billion fraud, its founder, Lance K. Poulsen, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Friday in one of the harshest white-collar punishments in history. Poulson is already doing time for bribing a witness in this case. Before NCFE filed for bankruptcy in 2002, it provided loans to a variety of health care companies. The loans were subsequently securitized into bonds and sold to investors and Wall Street firms. The company deliberately lent more to the facilities, many of which were owned by Mr. Poulsen himself, than their receivables were worth. The scheme finally came apart in the spring of 2002 when investors began to question the value of the loans, which forced National Century into a liquidity crisis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/business/28fraud.html?_r=1&dbk
