Alan Greenspan did not believe in regulating fraud.

Fascinating documentary on Frontline (PBS) - The Warning about the CFTC's efforts under Brooksley Born to prevent fraud in the derivatives markets, and to regulate it. A quote:

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"