It is a failure of the rule of law and accountability that many of the bankers and financiers still have their jobs and, in fact, are not sitting in jail or defending their behavior in court. But, it is even more revealing when you read the following, via The Financial Times today:

Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs on Wednesday admitted that banks lost control of the exotic products they sold in the run-up to the financial crisis, and said that some of the instruments lacked social or economic value.

In a speech to the Handelsblatt banking conference in Frankfurt, he also repeated an attack, first made in the spring, on Wall Street compensation practices, calling the furore over bankers’ pay “understandable and appropriate”.

   This would be laughable if it came from anyone else but Blankfein who, you may remember took home $70 million in 2007. In fact, he was so sorry about the greed of Goldman that he was truly sorry that Goldman made $2 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2009 that he gave that profit back to the U.S. taxpayers to make up for a tiny part of the economic calamity that Goldman helped foster…yeah, right, that never happened. Actually:

In recent months Goldman has faced a spate of bad publicity as lawmakers, corporate governance experts and the media have attacked its bonus accruals – amounting to $11.4bn in the first half of the year – and criticised its role in the financial crisis.

   Blankfein is a self-dealing, self-absorbed liar who will do anything to keep lining his pockets, including pretending to shed tears over past mistakes and doing so for one reason and one reason only–to soften any attempt to restrict the greed that drowned the economy of the country and the world, greed that led to the loss of millions of jobs and the wiping out of trillions of dollars in wealth.