Federal regulations hold the force and effect of law. The listed agencies (and all others) all have thousands of pages of rules and regulations that, if violated, are federal crimes that come with serious financial penalties as well as jail time.
That Congress has given some measure of its Constitutional lawmaking ability to federal agencies is not a partisan statement and is not debated as a matter of fact, the question is just whether you think it's okay / legal or not.
Of all of big bank CEOs at the time, this is probably the least arguable case of a CEO that should have been sent to prison. JP Morgan was taking less relative risks than any of the other big banks at the time. It was the only big bank that largely avoided a major credit crunch during the crisis, as they got out of subprime in 2006, before the credit crisis hit. It was also the only bank out of the nine largest in the US at the time that didn't need TARP funds, which allowed them to use the TARP funds that they did receive to buy other banks and businesses.
Half of the big bank CEOS, and major wall street players should be in jail... they just have more money then Sam Bankman-Fried had, because he lost it all. If he had substantial resources outside FTC, do you think he would be in jail?
> major issue was certainly not hiding it very well, if he hid it better that would have helped
His major issue was stealing the money. Wall Street has no shortage of high fuckery, but frequency of outright embezzlement is fairly low. Not because the people are better. But because regulations make it hard to hide.
No, that wasn't it. As Matt Levine put it, if you have $16 billion in liabilities, and you have $16 billion in T-bonds, you're in a good situation. If it's instead $16 billion in Bitcoin, well, you're a crypto bank, so it's probably fit for your purpose. If it's $16 billion in shitcoins, your risk judgement is questionable.
But FTX was none of those, it was $16 billion in assets FTX made up--it cost FTX $0 to acquire those assets and the valuation was arbitrarily inflatable to $16 billion. So the $16 billion in dollars that FTX acquired that caused it to accrue $16 billion in liabilities went... somewhere in return for $0. That's fundamentally stealing.
In the global financial crisis, the banks largely committed the sins in the first paragraph: they had bad risk management, and fundamentally underestimated risk in certain markets. To a large degree, they didn't even hide their risks at all (indeed, a large part of the cascading nature of the crisis was everyone piecing together who was now most in trouble). What FTX did was something completely different, just pissing away the money while pretending it was still in a vault, and hoping nobody would open the vault to find nothing was in there.
The problem is proving the culpability of a particular individual, because it is the organizational structure that drives criminal acts. That's why big organizations have lawyers on their payrolls in order to provide policies to shield individuals. The only way to get around that is to use RICO. I don't think any US attorney wants to use RICO against any big business in the states, thanks to the revolving door.
Not only is Thiel a dyed in the wool libertarian, but he also owns the dye factory and patents.
I think it's probably just his version of yanking the chain, but if anybody wants to submit to the experiment I'm sure he'll be happy to sit back and watch.
