The recent period of deregulation, lax enforcement and restrictions on investor and shareholder legal rights has facilitated a dramatic increase in fraudulent conduct and undermined our entire free market system.
Criminal investigations of Wall Street have soared in recent months and continue to increase, according to articles by Terry Frieden of CNNMoney.com and Brent Kendall of the Wall Street Journal. Those articles report that the FBI has 566 open corporate fraud investigations, including 43 investigations involving Wall Street and “matters directly related to the current financial crisis.” The FBI opened 36 new corporate fraud investigations in recent weeks.