What systemic fraud did Spitzer discover? His cases were all pretty ridiculous--he sued analysts for having second thoughts about their analysis; he went after

What systemic fraud did Spitzer discover? His cases were all pretty ridiculous--he sued analysts for having second thoughts about their analysis; he went after insurance companies for a commission structure that everyone in the industry was aware of; he went after Dick Grasso merely for getting a large compensation package (one of the reasons executive pay has gone up so much is that the risk of getting sued by someone like Spitzer keeps rising, too). I'm not sure why describing what Spitzer did is a vulgar cheap shot. If he didn't want people to say that he had anal sex with whores, he probably shouldn't have done it. All organizations influenced by politics are to some extent politicized. If you ran the SEC, a taxpayer-funded organization, and you were aware that some stories would come out that made you look bad, you might be tempted to quickly throw together some case that made you look on the ball. They picked synthetic CDOs, which are a couple levels of abstraction away from what your average journalist can explain (much less from what the audience can understand). So you're pimping out non-news for easy outrage, in order to distract from the real news that your organization didn't go after someone whom they had reason to suspect was committing fraud, but did spend time on analsins.com. You're still assuming that Goldman has more information than they had. The SEC said they were going after Goldman; Goldman didn't say that the SEC was full of well-paid porn addicts.