Think Uncle Sam is protecting the money you’ve stashed away in 401k’s, IRA’s and mutual funds?  Think again, folks.  The feds are, time and time again, allowing convicted felons to handle your retirement money – even though that’s blatantly against the law.  And I’m about to tell you exactly which firms have the felons in their employ – and why Uncle Sam is so happy to break the law on behalf of Wall Street and to YOUR detriment.  That’s all RIGHT NOW  in Episode #142.----Hello, SDI Nation – welcome to the podcast of record for savvy self-directed investors like you!Today, I have a real doozy for you.  It’s going to disgust you… unless, of course, you like blatant collusion between Uncle Sam and Wall Street that represents REAL RISK to your money.So, you ever heard of a QPAM?  Nah, most people haven’t.  It stands for “Qualified Professional Asset Manager”.  It’s a designation given by the feds to SOME companies that allows them to break the rules.Yep, you heard that right.  You’ve certainly heard me discussing the notion of prohibited transactions on this show, that group of laws that limits how you can use the money in your retirement accounts… you know, things like your IRA can’t buy assets from or sell assets to most of your family members because… well because the opportunity for fraud among related-party transactions is just far too high.And you know what?  That makes perfect sense.What you may not know is that those rules also apply in large part to financial institutions if they’re managing retirement funds.  In other words, if, for example, you have funds placed at JP Morgan or Credit Suisse or Citigroup or Deutsche Bank or UBS or… well, you get the picture… then those institutions have to play by the rules too, and they can’t do deals with other institutions that are related to them… in other words, the companies that they own… or other companies with the same owner.  You get the idea.Makes sense, right?  Remember:  Where YOU are concerned, the feds know that the opportunity for fraud is just far too high to allow transactions among related parties, so there are laws on the books for the exact same thing for the financial firms.Enter the QPAM – Qualified Professional Asset Manager.  This is a convenient little designation that Uncle Sam offers to certain institutions that, fundamentally, allows them to totally ignore the related party rules.  Yes, you heard that correctly – if your financial institution wants to do business with other divisions of itself using your retirement funds… the QPAM status gives them the right to do that.Sketchy, huh?Oh, my friends, that’s not the half of it.So, you’ll remember back in the 2005-2008 time frame, a little thing called the mortgage crisis happened.  Crazy things like no-doc loans and credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities were all the rage.  And there was so much money involved that the big Wall Street firms were willing to do anything – very nearly anything at all – to collect their huge pieces of the pie.  And so, many employees of those firms committed crimes… felonies, to be precise… and have since been convicted of those felonies.And, of course, federal law prohibits financial institutions from being approved as a QPAM – that thing that lets them use your money to trade with themselves – if the firm employs convicted felons.And that’s a big deal.  Literally billions of dollars in assets and income are at stake.So you don’t have anything to worry about.  Uncle Sam has your back.Yeah…. Right.Last week, the Department of Labor – the part of the federal government that is in charge of regulations related to retirement funds – announced that it granted a bit of a reprieve to Credit Suisse.  You see, the problem Credit Suisse had is that they have felons working at their company, but they still want to have that special QPAM designation.So what the Department of Labor say about this?  You might expect them to take the opportunity to stare down Credit Suisse firmly an