7 Things About Prosecuting Wall Street You Wanted to Know (But Were Too Depressed to Ask)

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http://www.alternet.org/7-things-about-prosecuting-wall-street-you-wanted-know-were-too-depressed-ask



***SNIP

1. Why did Holder say mega-banks are "too big to jail"?

Attorney General Holder recently said the Justice Department can't indict too-big-to-fail banks because it would endanger the nation's, and possible the world's, economy. Those comments were misleading at best, because Holder doesn't offer any plausible reason not to indict individual bank executives at those institutions.

***SNIP

2. If hurting 'too big to fail' banks is such a concern, why did the Justice Department and the SEC just sue Bank of America? By some measures it's the biggest mega-bank of them all.

The latest lawsuit against Bank of America describes massive, systematic, and very deliberate fraud against investors who backed residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Those investors included many pension funds, like the one that serves Detroit's retirees. There's evidence BofA bankers knowingly sold securities in which up to 40 percent of the mortgages failed to meet underwriting standards. That's against the law.

***SNIP

3. Why sue Bank of America at all, if they're in the banks' pockets?

Here we're getting into the realm of speculation. But Washington officials have multiple constituencies, presumably including wronged investors who want restitution of some kind.

***SNIP


4. The Justice Department has said it's too hard to get convictions in financial fraud cases. Is that true?

They've said it again and again: It's too hard to win convictions in financial fraud cases. The brief response to that is: How would they know? They've never tried.

[chervilant]

1. I've said this before,

but it bears repeating:

Banks always, always, always, always, always -- have I said always enough? -- ALWAYS get their money.

[hobbit709]

2. totally agree with your last line.

[Dustlawyer]

3. Holder is a sorry excuse of an AG, but make no mistake, Obama I suspect told him not to.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

4. I'll tell all of you the absolute truth how I feel,

just once, because I don't want to continually beat up on Obama, as I do think he's done a lot of very good things. But, I knew he was going to be a huge disappointment when Geithner made his very first speech and his basic response to the crisis was going to be those stress tests.
Now, the stress tests weren't a really awful idea, and they were actually done better and were far more accurate than the ones the EU did, which are universally considered not just a joke, but a bad joke. Some banks that passed those EU tests wound up going under months after the completion of the tests. Nothing like that happened here.
But the correct response to the crisis was the same as in the Depression: break up the big banks, chain em down, make sure they could never pull the crap they pulled again. After that first speech, I knew that wasn't going to happen. Martin Wolf at the Financial Times, hardly a radical, was apoplectic, and considered the idea that the Obama Admin was already a failed presidency right there.
So, anyway, point being, it was obvious from the beginning that Obama wasn't FDR. Everyone was hugely disappointed. He did turn the economy around in record time, showing the world that Hoover's excuses for not being able to do the same in the Depression were just a bunch of lousy excuses. Employment started growing again in the middle of 2009 and has been growing ever since. I don't think anyone could have done a better job of it in that area.
But we'd be in much better shape today if Obama had taken the FDR approach. But it would have taken a different Treasury Secretary than Geithner to get that done.

[snot]

5. There were plenty of convictions following the S&L crisis.

[Enthusiast]

6. That was then and

this is now.

We no longer hold these institutions and those that run them responsible for criminality. New World Order, don't ya know.

[woo me with science]

7. K&R