So, Does a $8 Billion Fraud Count as "Petty Theft" These Days?

[Tuckerfan]

This guy’s certainly a piker when compared to the likes of Bernie Madoff.

Federal regulators on Tuesday charged Texas financier R. Allen Stanford and three of his firms with a “massive” fraud that centered on high interest rate certificates of deposit and raided some of the companies’ offices.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Dallas, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Stanford orchestrated a fraudulent investment scheme centered on an $8 billion CD program that promised “improbable and unsubstantiated high interest rates.”

Stanford’s assets, along with those of the three companies, were frozen. Stanford’s firms include Antigua-based Stanford International Bank and two based in Houston: broker-dealer Stanford Group Co. and investment adviser Stanford Capital Management.

[Thurston Howell III] Eight billion dollars? My dear boy, what were you thinking? I have that much money in loose change in my couch in just one of my houses. If you’re going to steal, at least take an amount large enough to get you a small country and your own private island. [THIII]