“Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don’t. What’s up?”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/23/jon-stewart-cheating-teachers-go-to-jail-cheating-wall-streeters-dont-whats-up-with-that/

by grej • 11 years ago

307 152 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

rayiner5• 11 years ago

Because it's easy to understand why cheating on tests is wrong, and easy to explain to a jury what people did that was wrong. Try to explain LIBOR manipulation to a jury and explain why it's wrong.

wavefunction2• 11 years ago

I am pretty sure I could do that.

The more accurate answer is that rich and connected people are rarely held to account for their heinous crimes against the rest of us.

robot22• 11 years ago

I would agree with you if there were a history of difficulties prosecuting white collar crime.

claytonjy• 11 years ago

I wanted to say "but that's why they get a jury of their peers, people that know what means!" but then I remembered not only would that not happen, but even if it did, those same peers would likely have a tribe mentality and seek to protect their own.

wppick• 11 years ago

Teachers have much less money to spend on lawyers. If you steal/scam/cheat billions of dollars you can then afford a great team of lawyers

happyscrappy• 11 years ago

Well that would usually be the teachers unions but they are not going to go on a suicide mission to defend these teachers.

grej• 11 years ago

In order to explain that to a jury, you have to actually charge someone with a crime.

2close4comfort2• 11 years ago

Plus if you give enough money to the right people you never even get indicted so there you dont have to get involved with juries and mess stuff like that.

kaa2102• 11 years ago

A regulator or prosecutor needs to first be willing to charge a bank or Wall Street executive before anything can get to a jury.

Zigurd2• 11 years ago

Tax dodges, like straddles, are hard to explain, yet they get prosecuted.

rayiner5• 11 years ago

In a tax case, the legality of the conduct can be proven almost entirely on the papers. Everything relevant to the prosecution is in a formal financial document somewhere.

In a financial fraud case, the evidentiary problem is much harder. The difference between a legal transaction and an illegal one is often what was in the person's head, not just things you can deduce from a paper record. Sometimes you have emails or the like to fill in the blanks, but often you don't.

2close4comfort2• 11 years ago

Jail is for people who can't afford to get out of it.

jodah• 11 years ago

Apathetic, but true. In the case of teachers versus bankers, it's more about the institutions than the individuals, and the protections that come with working for those institutions.

smackfu• 11 years ago

OTOH, the teachers who got a jail sentence are the ones who didn't take a deal, even after being found guilty. Not really about money more than principles.

damian2000• 11 years ago

I was thinking that when watching a doco about western tourists to Thailand who get caught with small amounts of a drug on them. They get shaken down by the local police for a few thousand dollars, up to whatever they can afford. Those who can't pay get put in jail for a while. Not sure if it was bribery or what, but it seemed accepted by everyone involved.

tsotha9• 11 years ago

That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. Places with lots of tourists usually go pretty easy on them whenever it's possible. You don't want to scare your meal ticket into going somewhere else.

falsestprophet• 11 years ago

Jon Stewart's thesis is that teachers are punished for crimes and "Wall Street" is not.

In this segment he singularly cites the actions of loan officers soliciting incorrect information comparing their actions to teachers falsifying test results.

First of all, loan officers are hardly "Wall Street" fat cats. They are low level employees who are paid an average of $50,000 [1] and do not work for "Wall Street" firms like investment banks.

Secondly, loan officers operate throughout the United States rather than actually on Wall Street or in Manhattan and, as a group, are subject to the jurisdiction of the federal government, 50 states, and 3,144 counties each with independent prosecutors (elected state's attorneys, district attorneys, etc.).

If none of the thousands of entities who could have brought cases have done so, either there is conspiracy vaster than any other or there are not credible cases to bring.

[1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/loan-officer-salary-SRCH_K...

malandrew2• 11 years ago

While I hate the plea bargaining system, this would be a great opportunity to use it to get at those up at the top. Use the $50k a year people to get the managers. Use the managers to get their managers, so on and so forth. Anyone at the very bottom that takes the plea gets off scott-free. As you move up the food chain, you hand greater sentences.

agwa• 11 years ago

Why is something that you profess to hate suddenly acceptable in this situation?

yummyfajitas2• 11 years ago

A third possibility is simply that there is no political benefit to prosecuting mortgage brokers and the home buyers who colluded with them to get banks to issue risky loans. Think about it - you are a prosecutor in a county with tens of mortgage brokers, thousands of home buyers and 0 banks. What political benefit do you gain from it?

rcarrigan873• 11 years ago

It's a tough case to make but you can say loan officers were pressured by their managers to falsify info. Managers were pressured by their higher ups. Eventually it comes back to Wall Street firms who were lusting over subprime mortgages so they could make more commissions.

rayiner5• 11 years ago

Step 1: Loan officers pressured by their managers.

Step 2: Managers pressured by their higher ups.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit (for Wall Street firms lusting over subprime mortgages).

In a nutshell why this has been so difficult to prosecute.

wehadfun2• 11 years ago

Teachers, Garbage men... The DA and judges in Atlanta love to throw low level employees in jail for doing their jobs. Maybe they are too dumb to realise that these employees more or less do what they are told.

No one below the district level should have been on trial for this.

I agree with you to hold the actual loan officer liable is dumb. They were following directions.

[1] http://fox17online.com/2015/03/09/garbage-man-to-spend-30-da...

kjs33• 11 years ago

So knowingly cheating in order to get a bigger bonus for themselves isn't criminal because they were told to do it? Pretty screwed up world you live in from an ethics perspective, but then I've heard all sorts of "they might be crooks but they shouldn't be held accountable for it or anything" sophistry around this case.

klochner2• 11 years ago

Loan Officers get a percentage of the loan amount, and it's not rare for them to make $300k/year in a good year.

FireBeyond• 11 years ago

Where do you live that it's "not rare" for the loan officer of a suburban bank originating mortgages to be making north of a quarter million dollars?

enraged_camel• 11 years ago

Why do you keep putting Wall Street in quotation marks?

spiritplumber2• 11 years ago

Because not a lot of financial work is actually being done on Wall St. anymore, IIRC it mostly moved north.

The stock exchange even looks emptyish nowadays because it's all done online.

15step• 11 years ago

You don't have to go any farther then the fact that Navinder Sarao might go to jail for 20 years, but Jon Corzine, the CEO of the brokerage Sarao used, continues to walk free as one of the must successful failures ever.

MrZongle2• 11 years ago

Simple: there are two Americas.

The first is the one that is populated by the wealthy and the elite; some people you've heard of, and a lot you've not. They're former Presidents and senators, important political donors, lobbyists, and a cloud of related individuals that orbit trust funds and old money. This America features well-groomed lawns, catered luncheons, executive offices, first-class health care, golden parachutes and custom transportation.

The second is where the rest of us live. It features waiting both in lines and on telephones, meals grabbed on the fly, taxation, potential observation and harassment by Federal or local security agencies, wildly varying health care, and advertisements on everything.

vinay427• 11 years ago

It's important to note that there are significant overlaps here, especially in daily life habits. What this boils down to is income inequality and the different lifestyles that result.

atom-morgan• 11 years ago

Example: Petraeus just got a slap on the wrist

rhino3692• 11 years ago

Mortgage loan offices aren't quite "Wall Streeters." These are people in your local communities and they are defrauding the people loaning the money, who are wall street people. So not like Gordon Gecko or Leo in Wolf of Wallstreet. But the guy in the illfitted suit who pesters you about mortgages when you in line to deposit a check.

I make this point because these people aren't super rich wall street people above the law. And plenty more than one were caught and jailed for it, I've found 4 examples on the first page of my bing search. Stewart is saying only one bank exec went to jail, but bank execs weren't the ones doing this mortgage fraud.

Some "Wall Street" banks do sell mortgages directly and would employ these mortgage offices, but a lot banks don't like Goldman Sachs, the former Lehman Bros.

The question is whether big commercial banks were complicit in the fraud of their lower level employees. You'd need to find an email or someone willing to testify that the banks knew that the loan offices in podunk were encouraging fraud. That is an extremely tough case to prove without solid evidence.

Also, this kind of document fraud was only a minor part of the financial collapse. The big mistake, which Stewart briefly touched on, was that the rating agencies massive fucked up. The financial risk model they used didn't work.

pcwalton• 11 years ago

Yeah, I was suspicious of the claim that only one mortgage banker went to jail, and for 12 months only. In fact, Lee Farkas is serving a 30 year sentence for mortgage fraud, effectively a life sentence at his age.

zzalpha2• 11 years ago

Also, this kind of document fraud was only a minor part of the financial collapse. The big mistake, which Stewart briefly touched on, was that the rating agencies massive fucked up.

Well, no, those are two sides of the same coin.

On the one hand you have people giving out dubious loans and reselling them while claiming that if you mix the shit up the right way it turns into gold.

On the other hand you have ratings agencies who bought into the nonsense.

The two were 100% complicit and, I think, equally to blame.

rhino3692• 11 years ago

But the dubious loans were known to be dubious, it wasn't fraud. It would have been a problem even if there was no fraud.

The fraud exacerbated the issue further, but I wouldn't say it is two sides of the same coin.

ConfuciusSay• 11 years ago

The big financial institutions were demonstrably complicit in the fraud of the underwriters and loan officers. There are emails, and plenty of people willing to testify. The problem is that the SEC and DOJ never pursued those investigations.

A while back, Frontline did their own investigation on this very topic, and interviewed multiple underwriters and loan officers who said that the higher ups on Wall Street were literally directing everyone to not abide by their own standards.

You can watch the entire documentary here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

Lanny Breuer from the DOJ was interviewed in this documentary, and his attempt to explain why the DOJ did not pursue any charges on executives was so laughable, and the evidence presented from Frontline's cursory investigation was so damning, that Mr. Breuer resigned days after the program was aired. After not prosecuting any banking executives, he then of course went on through the revolving door to make $4M/year by taking a position at a corporate law/lobbying firm that defends financial institutions.

This is NOT a "tough case" - the solid evidence is there. This is a case of a captured regulatory system.

Also, to say that ratings agencies simply "fucked up" is disingenuous. They were totally and knowingly complicit as well. The way the system was set up, the more they gave good ratings to crap, the more money they made. That's not just a "fuck up".

To the main point of the rant, aside from the regulatory capture, the difference between teachers and Wall Street is that Wall Street is very good at setting up a system where there's plausible deniability for executives, massive lobbying efforts to garner political influence, and if needed, gigantic legal teams to fight for every inch.

_yosefk6• 11 years ago

You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.

Madoff, for instance, moved from Wall Street into a cell where he belongs, refuting the above headline. His regulators, however, weren't even charged with anything AFAIK. That despite their inaction for many years being either criminal negligence or the result of being bribed.

(From http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-01-07/jpmorgan-pa... - "The government regulators, led by the Securities and Exchange Commission, also didn't catch Bernie Madoff, even though they were his regulators and that was literally their job. And while yes JPMorgan ignored some red flags, so did the SEC. Like, the many many credible letters they got to the effect of "Bernie Madoff is a big ol' Ponzi scheme." Should the SEC be paying an even bigger penalty than $1.7 billion?")

kenj0418• 11 years ago

You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.

Nor should they unless they were colluding with him or accepting bribes.

The punishment for just being bad at your job should be getting fired, not jail. Of course, I doubt many lost their job either.

civilian• 11 years ago

The punishment for just being bad at your job should be getting fired, not jail.

You should keep that in mind next time you get surgery. :-)

pwnna• 11 years ago

A bad engineer who designed a bridge that later collapsed and injured/killed people will go to jail, in addition to being fired.

_yosefk6• 11 years ago

I don't know the answer to the following questions, but I'll take wild guesses:

1. Were Madoff's regulators fired? (My guess: they weren't, it wasn't even weighed as a realistic option by whoever should fire them.)

2. Was there an investigation into whether they were bribed, as there should be when someone is so spectacularly incompetent at their job that it's hard to reconcile with having the mental skills necessary to get the job in the first place? (My bet: there was no investigation whatsoever.)

shit_parade2• 11 years ago

What about when police officers wantonly kill people or CIA operatives torture the innocent?

Of course they should go to jail, justice is blind, the law applies to all, look up the magna carta. When some are more equal than others injustice and corruption occurs, we see it vividly throughout the US corporate-fascist complex.

honksillet• 11 years ago

There are plenty of examples of regulators acting abusively or in bad faith. They can get away with this because there are no repercussions.

neonbat5• 11 years ago

There's no real incentive for regulators to regulate if you think about it. If you DO regulate you're less likely to have exit jobs to Wall Street. If you DON'T regulate and things go well, everything will be good and you'll go through the revolving door to work for big banks and big bucks. If you DON'T regulate and everything goes very badly (you know like a financial meltdown) it's "not your fault."

rayiner5• 11 years ago

That doesn't make any sense. The more you regulate, the more banks need in-house regulatory folks and the more opportunities you have to go through the revolving door.

Deregulation is not a good thing for people who want to go in-house doing regulatory work.

chc• 11 years ago

And yet Wall Street is highly regulated (it might not be very effective, but there is a huge amount of regulation nonetheless), so it seems like there must be forces at work beyond what you're considering here.

cylinder• 11 years ago

Why would someone go to prison for being bad at their job? I don't think you know what a crime is.

Dylan16807• 11 years ago

You've heard of criminal negligence, right? Where someone is so outrageously bad that it can only be intentional, with something important at stake that gets hurt.

mullingitover• 11 years ago

With the amount of money in play, the implication is that they were being bribed to look the other way. If nothing else they should get audited down to their grade school allowance to be sure they were merely grossly negligent.

afarrell• 11 years ago

Everyone should read http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=18

Lawtonfogle4• 11 years ago

You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.

Are they paid enough for that increase in risk? I don't know what they make, but other government positions are already underpaid compared to their private sector equivalents. Making them come with a risk of jail time for failing ones job too badly will only result in even less qualified people filling those positions.

tapp• 11 years ago

I've often thought that we should pay financial regulators competitively with what they could make in the private sector AND in conjunction institute some kind of sweeping moratorium (e.g. you may not take any corresponding job in the private sector for at least 10 years after your government service ends.)

I'm sure this would be politically untenable. Headlines would cry about absurd salaries being given to government employees.

However I'm equally confident it would save us money in the long run. The current system seems almost designed to create toothless regulators and a revolving door.

shas3• 11 years ago

What's the basis for sending regulators to jail? Will you send cops to prison when crimes happen, because they failed to prevent them? This is somewhat of a pre-cog/ Minority Report dilemma. I think law makes a reasonable distinction between crimes of commission and crimes of omission. Proving motive and intent are important parts of the judicial process. Madoff intended to defraud.

You can prevent a person with malicious intent from causing further damage by imprisoning them. You 'deter' people who commit crimes of omission by keeping them away from whatever they proved incompetent at (debar lawyers, de-license doctors and regulators, fire engineers, etc.)

guelo• 11 years ago

That's a moot point, it's a revolving door between wall street and the regulators. It's the same people.

perfunctory• 11 years ago

You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.

Clever way to divert a discussion.

superuser2• 11 years ago

criminal negligence

A regulatory agency that serves a liberal (or at least pro-regulation) administration failing to catch a crook is indeed bad at its job, and yes people should probably get fired.

A regulatory agency that serves an anti-regulation administration (and in particular Bush's SEC) failing to catch a crook, is doing exactly what the American people voted for it to do, which is nothing at all.

You can't win an election on the platform that someone's job shouldn't exist, he shouldn't have the tools to do it, and we shouldn't be paying his salary, then suddenly turn around and want to throw him in jail for not doing that effectively enough.

jokoon• 11 years ago

I wonder if that's the idea voters have of Reaganomics.

_yosefk6• 11 years ago

Weren't Madoff's regulators paid a salary?

What tools did they lack to check the warnings they got from numerous sources? Do they not have the right to check which securities the fund actually holds in its bank accounts?

danmaz74• 11 years ago

You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.

Not true. They go to jail when they're caught getting corrupted by those they should regulate, which unfortunately happens often enough.

brohoolio• 11 years ago

Seriously.

Animats• 11 years ago

This is perhaps the biggest failure in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. There should have been many more criminal prosecutions on Wall Street. It didn't help that the Secretary of the Treasury at the time came from Goldman Sachs.

Criminal convictions of CEOs are useful. They're very effective in changing CEO behavior. Sending a few low-level drug dealers to jail for a year does little to change drug dealer behavior in the neighborhood. Sending a few Fortune 500 CEOs to jail for a year tends to result in substantial CEO behavior modification. There was a famous example of this in 1961, when executives of GE, Westinghouse, and Allis-Chalmers were found guilty of price-fixing and sent to jail. That changed corporate anti-trust behavior for a generation.

jsprogrammer3• 11 years ago

People should not be punished soley to 'make an example' or for large-scale 'behavior modification'. Punishment should only be doled out for actual wrongdoings and only proportional to that individual's actions.

anigbrowl3• 11 years ago

You're assuming that the CEOs cited in the example were not actually guilty.

s73v3r2• 11 years ago

A CEO is responsible for the actions their company takes.

crazy1van• 11 years ago

Criminal convictions of CEOs are useful.

Yes, if they actually committed a crime and there is evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

A drug dealer who gives all his money to feed the poor is morally good but legally a criminal. A CEO who lays off a chunk of his company to upgrade his yacht is a slimeball but not a criminal.

Being morally repugnant is not the same as being a criminal. The urge to ignore the letter of the law and obey the will of the mob turns us into a nation of men instead of a nation of laws.

eli_gottlieb4• 11 years ago

There's not much point being a nation of unjust laws, so they should probably be rewritten to criminalize the really severe harms and impose less penalty on less-severe harms.

suprgeek• 11 years ago

Politically connected & Rich people do not go to Jail for White-collar crimes. Think about the revolving door between Wall street and the Obama/Bush/Clinton administrations.

Would you put your "buddy" in Jail if it meant that the political contributions would dry up and your opponent is going to get a war chest to fight you? Of course not!

But an educator? These people cheated to keep their jobs and get (minor) pay raises - by definition they cannot fight back so the full weight of the Criminal Justice system (Racketeering Laws - typically used against Mafia figures) was used to toss some of them in Jail for upto 20 years!

Let's face it - the American Criminal justice system basically preys on those least able to protect themselves from its abuses.

MaysonL• 11 years ago

Charles Keating was fairly well connected: remember the "Keating Five"? (US Senators who tried to influence regulators to go easy on Keating)

He spent over four years in federal prison after being convicted of white collar crimes.

bko• 11 years ago

I think prosecutors would rather fine the banks tens of billions of dollars rather than throw people into jail.

For instance, the JPM $13 billion settlement (summarized):

- $2 billion to the Justice Department, which will then deposit the money into a fund at the United States Treasury.

- $7 billion, will flow to a range of government authorities, some more obscure than others

- JPMorgan agreed to make a “lump sum payment” of $4 billion “payable to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, divided between them,”

- The National Credit Union Administration, the federal agency that regulates credit unions, said it would collect a $1.4 billion share of the $7 billion pie “for losses incurred by corporate credit unions as a result of the purchases of the faulty securities.”

- $515 million goes to FDIC

- $613 million to NY Attorney General (expand homeowner assistance programs)

etc, etc, etc...

[0] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/where-does-jpmorgans-...

tokenadult2• 11 years ago

This could be taken to mean that society (correctly, in my opinion) considers the work of schoolteachers to be more crucial for the future of our society than the work of "Wall Streeters." With a more important role in society comes higher responsibility and just possibly greater accountability.

The Answer Sheet opinion blog, from which this post commenting on a Jon Stewart Daily Show is kindly submitted for our discussion, basically has a theme of decrying any public policy that makes schoolteachers accountable for actually teaching something to the learners in their care. That's a defensible policy position, I suppose, if you think that employment in the public school system is a jobs program for graduates of teacher-training programs. But I think it is also a defensible policy position to agree that spending money on schools is good, good for society in general, but especially so if the schools actually help learners learn. If learners are not learning well in school, and similarly disadvantaged learners in other schools are learning better, let's learn from the schools that are doing better how they are succeeding, and emulate their practices. That doesn't sound very radical to me.

Right now in the United States, the school-to-school variance in learning results of pupils is not very large, not even particularly large between poor and rich neighborhoods (by international comparisons).[1] But the teacher-to-teacher variance in teaching effectiveness within any one school is quite large, and one of the best things schools could do to become more effective rapidly is simply to hire the best available teachers, and let the lowest few percent of teachers (by teacher effectiveness) seek other occupations more suited to their abilities.[2] Other measures to improve teacher quality will also be helpful for schools and the learners in their care.[3] Teachers who cheat on tests used in part to gauge the effectiveness of teachers cheat all of society out of having better teachers.

[1] http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/

[2] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h...

[3] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...

s73v3r2• 11 years ago

"This could be taken to mean that society (correctly, in my opinion) considers the work of schoolteachers to be more crucial for the future of our society than the work of "Wall Streeters." "

If that were true, wouldn't we pay them more and treat them better?

tokenadult2• 11 years ago

Teachers have job security that is very rare in the private sector. They also have fully funded benefits of a kind that is rare in most occupations at matching salaries. They also get a lot of psychic rewards from their jobs, and graduates of teacher-training programs are in large supply, changing the supply:demand ratio for that occupation. I would indeed be glad to pay teachers more in salary, but I'd also like to be sure that wherever your children or my children go to school, the friendly local school is hiring only effective teachers, not ineffective teachers. If teachers get behind public policies that ensure that, then I think they will see increases in pay. (See the links in my earlier post in this thread.)

scelerat• 11 years ago

Stewart's comparisons remind me of Eddie Izzard's riff on mass murderers. Small numbers of crimes, committed by a small number of people: easy to grasp and easy to prosecute; large numbers of crimes committed systemically: the mind boggles; medals more likely than punishment.

Izzard (NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM

jessaustin• 11 years ago

If we really cared to prevent "financial crises" like the one under discussion, we wouldn't be wringing our hands about whom to imprison. Instead, when firms went bust, we'd leave them that way. When all the money is gone, shareholder lawsuits will punish corrupt and incompetent executives more than prosecutors ever dreamed.

EDIT: for those who've forgotten what actually happened, Taibbi has a good primer:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of...

xmlblog• 11 years ago

It's called money.

jrockway• 11 years ago

Privileged Wall St. firms can afford better lawyers than schoolteachers in Atlanta? I had no idea...

crimsonalucard• 11 years ago

Black people get shot up by police, white people don't. What's up?

tzs• 11 years ago

White people get shot by police. You have to look to find the cases, though, because they don't generally make the national news.

Here are a few.

http://wreg.com/2014/11/25/salt-lake-cop-cleared-in-shooting...

http://wreg.com/2015/04/22/family-of-unarmed-white-man-kille...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/27/white-teen-g...

In fact, more white people than black people are shot by police in the US. The rate for blacks getting shot is higher, but not the number.

kakkou• 11 years ago

Yet these stories don't make it onto the national news? They aren't plastered all over CNN? Where are the riots for these deaths?

tsotha9• 11 years ago

What's up is it's national news when a black person gets shot by a white cop, and when it's a white person taking the bullet the story stays on the local crime blotter.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Its national news when unarmed people are shoot by cops and eyewitness reports or other early evidence suggests there is no good cause for the shooting, which for some reason happens more often when white cops shoot black people than any other combination.

tomohawk• 11 years ago

I would hope that adults entrusted with the care of our children and betraying that trust would be punished much more severely than wall streeters engaged in some sort of shenanigans.

jgoewert• 11 years ago

I would hope that adults entrusted with the care of our children would be paid more to get the top talent the job requires. Even a 1% change in a students learning is an immeasurable sum of profit to an organization and someone who can eek that out should get the compensation due.

goldfeld• 11 years ago

What about those teaching cheaters?

heisenbit• 11 years ago

There is a huge cultural problem and the teachers and MBS scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.

When it is acceptable that results count no matter what the means. When it is acceptable that results are measured by a single number. When conflicts of interest are ignored by regulators

Then you get:

  - inflated grades

  - inflated assessments of property values

but also:

  - inflated arrests by policeman chasing quotas instead of helping citizens (in other parts of the world police are reluctant to arrest people due to dislike of paperwork)

  - inflated claims by prosecutors turning a blind eye to weak evidence (in other parts of the world prosecutors don't fear for their own job)

  - inflated money printing

  - inflated tech stock valuations

  - prolonged ignorance of default risks

  - HFT

Markets work but there is such a thing as externalized costs. Regulators have a duty to monitor and step in when the line is overstepped. If they don't the benefits accrue to the powerful who cheat and the cost are born by the powerless.

It is a good thing that the "regulator" stepped in and stopped the teachers grade inflation.

However the way the regulator did this here is another example of single minded black and white thinking. Just because the grade inflation problem is bad it does not mean one can fix it with a single blow of a heavy hammer. Fear of rare random enforcement actions will only intimidate the people but won't stop further crimes.

Hard real life problems need well planned, consistently implemented and balanced measures.

“Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don’t. What’s up?”

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