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Where “Cycle of Lies” tries to psychoanalyze Armstrong, “Wheelmen” attempts to do the same to our world. “Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshiping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok,” Albergotti and O’Connell write. “This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.”

Unfortunately, policy is moving in the opposite direction. Rather than increasing protections for older consumers, the current administration is proposing rolling back the fiduciary rule which would require financial advisors to put their client’s interest first. With the fiduciary rule now in doubt, we are truly entering into the golden age of fraud.

By now, everyone has a good sense of the potential health implications of Covid-19. But if you’ve got any connection to the fraud-prevention business, you know that the Coronavirus is also making 2020 the golden age of fraud — specifically bank fraud.

It’s not clear if this is because it’s a more fertile environment for fraud due to diminished face-to-face interactions, if it’s spiking unemployment leading part-time scammers into full-time crime, or if it’s just a more desperate global economic climate. No matter what the cause, fraud is way, way up. And nowhere is that more clear than in banking.

While many auditing standards have been changed or created in the past decades, so has technology. If companies such as GE, Enron, Wells Fargo, and Chesapeake Energy can perpetrate large-scale frauds simply by manipulating accounting techniques or outright lying, imagine what could be possible with the manipulation of AI to their benefit. Sam Antar, a key player in the “Crazy Eddie” fraud of the 1980s (see below), speaking at the 2019 Williamsburg Fraud Conference, said that he believed today is “the golden age of fraud.”

Chanos also teaches a course on the history of financial fraud (“how to detect it, not how to commit it”, he quips) at Yale University, his alma mater. The syllabus stretches back to the 17th century.

Today, he says, “we are in the golden age of fraud”.

There was a great deal of embezzlement and fraud leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s. I've quoted this passage before, but it's worth posting again. John Kenneth Galbraith described what happened -- and what will happen again -- in his 1954 book, The Great Crash - 1929, as follows:

"In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in -- or more precisely not in -- the country's businesses and banks. This inventory -- it should perhaps be called the bezzle -- amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

The stock market boom and the ensuing crash caused a traumatic exaggeration of these normal relationships. To the normal needs for money, for home, family and dissipation, was added, during the boom, the new and overwhelming requirement for funds to play the market or to meet margin calls. Money was exceptionally plentiful. People were also exceptionally trusting. A bank president who was himself trusting Kreuger, Hopson, and Insull was obviously unlikely to suspect his lifelong friend the cashier. In the late twenties the bezzle grew apace.

Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

After the first week or so of the crash, reports of defaulting employees were a daily occurrence. They were far more common than the suicides. On some days comparatively brief accounts occupied a column or more in the Times. The amounts were large and small, and they were reported from far and wide. ...

Each week during the autumn more such unfortunates were revealed in their misery. Most of them were small men who had taken a flier in the market and then become more deeply involved. Later they had more impressive companions. It was the crash, and the subsequent ruthless contraction of values which, in the end, exposed the speculation by Kreuger, Hopson, and Insull with the moey of other people. Should the American economy ever achieve permanent full employment and prosperity, firms should look well to their auditors. One of the uses of depression is the exposure of what auditors fail to find. Bagehot once observed: "Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected." [pp. 132-35]

Galbraith's point was that there were many criminal activities going on before the 1929 crash, but nobody cared, as long as everyone was making money. But once the crash occurred, any irregularity was viewed with suspicion and led to an investigation. These investigations turned up many cases of embezzlement -- people who had "temporarily borrowed" money that wasn't theirs to invest in the stock market, and then got caught in the crash.