It's Time to Stop the Looters on Wall Street

The SEC's charges against Goldman Sachs reveal a whole new kind of fraud at work in the financial crisis, writes Paul Krugman of the New York Times . If Goldman had simply sold securities while betting they would fail, it would be “reprehensible” but not illegal. But selling securities deliberately designed to fail? “That's what I would call looting.”

This kind of malfeasance—and it wasn't just Goldman—proves that there's an “urgent need to change Wall Street,” Krugman argues. If you listened to Republicans or financial lobbyists, “you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket,” and only strong regulatory reform will change that. (More Paul Krugman stories.)