Translating Fraud

Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover (“It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in,” Lyndon Johnson concisely established), the FBI has evolved excessively. It also dedicates itself to eagerly pursuing financial fraud. Recently, after months of hard work, it managed to decipher a code used by some villainous banks to manipulate the purchase of U.S. municipal debt. According to federal investigators, the accused banks “use certain codes — in some ways they are almost like the mafia or the drug dealers…” in order to set prices, manipulate auctions and trick citizens. The agency has detained three employees of the Swiss bank UBS; another 19 persons are under investigation. They say that Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are also involved. The FBI ought to publish the code, so that taxpayers have an idea of the imagination used by the defrauding bankers to fool the vigilance of the financial authorities. With the FBI it can’t be done.

Something doesn’t fit. Do banks and financial intermediaries really need a code or encrypted language to hide their intentions? Isn’t banking terminology sufficiently cryptic to confuse agents of law and order? If they have invented their own language to fix prices and trick the market, it must be extremely complex — enough to be analyzed by the linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps the FBI needed Navajo interpreters, as did the U.S. Army during World War II, to read the fraudsters’ secret plans.

Given that the FBI has achieved the impossible and laid out the decoding of metabanking slang, it should be able to help Spanish consumers decipher the content of contracts and mortgages, the fine print of loans and the interpretation of banking commissions. All legal, of course, but enigmatic. Clients try for decades and don’t figure it out. You have to be from the FBI to understand them.