Who should control your investments?

As you read the except below, think about your investments.

You can take control of your investments, simplify what you own, and save a bundle on costs for the rest of your investing life ... or, rely on banks, brokers, planners, Wall Street and Washington.

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From the NYTimes.com website:

"A Bank Crisis Whodunit, With Laughs and Tears"

By Gretchen Morgenson


"... so little has changed as a result of the debacle, in both banking and in its regulation.... many of these institutions are even bigger than they were before. With too-big-to-fail institutions now larger than ever, we are almost certain to go through another episode like 2008 in the not-too-distant future...

The report shows how the Fed refused to exert its authority on predatory lending. On Page 94, we learn that from 2000 to 2006, it referred a grand total of three institutions to prosecutors for possible fair-lending violations in mortgages.

The Fed “succumbed to the climate of the times,” its general counsel, Scott G. Alvarez, told commission investigators. It is hard for a supervisor to challenge banks when they are highly profitable, other officials said...

For those of you who’ve wondered why there have been so few prosecutions of mortgage fraud during this epidemic, your answer is on Page 164. “The terrible thing that happened,” said William K. Black, a former fraud investigator in the savings-and-loan crisis who is a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, “was that the F.B.I. got virtually no assistance from the regulators, the banking regulators and the thrift regulators.”

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Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/business/30gret.html