Those are systemic changes, though. Breaking up banks, reinstating Glass Steagall, that sort of thing. I don't think those solutions are out of reach. It will be tough, but it certainly seems doable.
It is a shame that politicians are demagoguing with all this "they need to go to jail" talk, because it is a distraction from the actual problem. That is simply that when too much leverage is applied to the same bet and hedged in the same way by everyone, it will blow up catastrophically when things go bad. That has nothing to do with legality or fraud or any such thing, and everything to do with regulation. It was a political and intellectual failure, not a moral one.
It is a shame that politicians are demagoguing with all this "they need to go to jail" talk
Depending on how cynic you are you could believe this is exactly the message that $wall_street wants them to push. Everyone knows that nobody relevant is going to jail anyway, but it's a nice, superficial "debate" to keep the general public busy with...
Nice in the sense that you can apparently drag it out near infinitely. Remember: Lehmann crashed 5 years ago. Yet when you look at the state of discussion in the mainstream media you'd think it happened just yesterday.
It is a shame that politicians are demagoguing with all this "they need to go to jail" talk, because it is a distraction from the actual problem. That is simply that when too much leverage is applied to the same bet and hedged in the same way by everyone, it will blow up catastrophically when things go bad. That has nothing to do with legality or fraud or any such thing, and everything to do with regulation. It was a political and intellectual failure, not a moral one.