The problem with the 2008 crash was that it was a systemic flaw spread across many parties (originators, bundlers, derivative underwriters, etc). There wasn’t some cabal of evil laughing traders watching as their grand scheme collapsed.
How about the guys knowingly making loans to people that could not afford them because they knew those loans would be sold so they would not be on the hook for them. How about the guys that hid very shady/risky debt that spread like cancer throughout the system. You can't honestly think that that whole crisis was from a small number of bad actors? People knew to look the other way.
>How about the guys knowingly making loans to people that could not afford them because they knew those loans would be sold so they would not be on the hook for them.
How do you force someone to take a loan? Does the recipient have no responsibility whatsoever, in your opinion?
>How about the guys that hid very shady/risky debt that spread like cancer throughout the system.
What does this even mean? There is "risky debt" all over the entire financial system, all the time. Again, if AIG doesn't know the risk of the financial assets it is purchasing, that is their problem, and it is accountable to its customers. What else are they being paid for?
I guess that’s the distinction between unethical and illegal?
I don’t think it’s illegal to make a loan you know someone can’t pay and then sell said loan to someone who is willing to buy it even when they know it has a high default risk.
> How about the guys knowingly making loans to people that could not afford them because they knew those loans would be sold so they would not be on the hook for them.
Assuming no fraud involved, this wasn’t clearly illegal at the time. You can’t just prosecute people for being bad people; you need a law.
What happened in 2008 was a kind of systematic problem, not illegal stuff by Banking execs ... mostly. A lot of the truly illegal stuff was petty: loan officers falsifying applications, individuals doing same etc..
As for the current let up in prosecutions, it's hard to tell if it's down 'because Trump appointment' or something else.
I mean 'net net' it technically went downward during Obama and may not have spiked during 2010 were it not for crises.
In the same article they indicate overall prosecutions going way up.
It could be that they are not insider trading, but moving on to other crimes.
The ratings agencies that were giving AAA ratings to financial instruments that were built on lies and fraud just because there were very big deserve some scrutiny. It's hard to believe that the entire industry was incompetent and that none of them were colluding with the people offering those instruments.
So yes, the ratings agencies may have been cheating, but they are not remotely 'bankers'.
And it's 'very easy to believe' why they did it - because ratings are their source of income. If they don't play nice, banks go elsewhere.
Similarly 'Gartner' and other such entities: you don't buy their reports, you may not get in the 'magic quadrant'. No 'collusion' is needed, just a brain.
But this misses the question again: what did these banking execs do that was illegal? What should they be prosecuted for?
There's just not much there.
The system relies on Credit - if one part of the system goes down, it can take the rest with it. It's not entirely irrational that one bank goes down - the risk of course is the collateral damage.
The 2008 crises was a systematic failure of lack of oversight, greed, stupidity and some bad actors, mostly not illegal activity.
But seriously, prosecution of white collar crime on a scale that actually makes change seems to have gone the way of the dodo here.