Two of the three kinds of white-collar crime he noted for the last fiscal crisis weren't CEO-led.
Taking out fraudulent mortgages had a lot of low-level people allowing or encouraging "little people" to commit fraud. It was a systemic problem, but there's little evidence it was led by anything more than "close more mortgages, make more money" sales pay structures. Nobody checked up on the little guy. This is, of course, white collar crime. We didn't notice this.
Appraisal fraud was a real issue. However, most of the appraisers I've met in the last decade weren't CEOs or working for large companies. They worked for mortgage companies as contractors or were independent. Same for home inspectors. Perhaps in large cities this is the case, but it wasn't the case for that little ol' town called Houston, Texas. Again, it's white collar crime. We barely noticed this.
The third was the traditional view of white collar crime, involving fiduciaries' interacting with abstract markets, accounts that never see real currency. and pushing paper and forms around (often electronically) to scam people or take advantages of gaps in the system. This is where all the action was, we liked to think. Of course, the problem with having the white-collar crime at this level in the 2008 melt-down was that they didn't know what the base securities were worth. Many couldn't be properly and rigorously valued because of fraudulent mortgage applications and faulty appraisals, and there was no clear way to identify how the likely sound mortgages were mixed with the questionable and the unsound mortgages. This might still have become a problem if the first two types of crimes weren't so extensive. But it may not have. It's a knock-on effect from the first two, and having a lot of failed or soon-to-fail mortgages drove down prices, which made more mortgagees fail.
But his big problem is trying to conflate different types of crime and saying that you not only can't disaggregate them, it's morally wrong to even try. This is self-serving, because it exalts his particular soapbox. But if you're going to rent or buy in an area, or decide whether to let your kid play outside, the crime rate you care about is property and personal crimes. When you call the police, it's usually because of those who kinds of things. If you're told there's a huge crime rate but that it's all white-collar crime, you don't know what to make of it. Do you worry about the crimes over $1 million and treat them differently from the $5000 crimes? You would if it's rape versus stealing lawn ornaments. Yes, both are crimes, but the NYPD or police don't much care about securities fraud and, to be honest, the white-collar crime rate in my neighborhood doesn't affect property values very much. This offends him. White collar crimes can hurt far more people, but the effect is spread out--and often those affected aren't the poorest of the poor, but those with more to invest.
Thsi isn't always the case: Where I worked in the '90s had an instance of white collar crime, where the VP used fraudulent invoices to have money wired to a company managed by a relative. He was Chinese, but white collar, and his relative had talked to the government about getting investment money, had overrepresented the profits to be made, and was on the hook for eithe coughing up the money or being sentenced to massive amounts of jail time. (You don't mess with government profits, they come with the state regulatory and court apparatus ready to send armed police to seize your accounts, your real property, and you.) The problem wasn't his relative--the problem was the entrepreneur, who didn't so much lie as overstate expectations. But too often in white-collar crime you go after the person who has the most money and the person you can reach, not necessarily the actually guilty party. It didn't help that his relative wasn't a Party member and was a little bit politically suspect. But this gets to a second problem.
A minor problem is discerning between crimes and errors, intent and negligence or simple oversight given due diligence; telling the difference between reported crimes and assumed unreported crime rates. This is a problem people have with the Comey/HRC report. HRC did something wrong, punish her. But US criminal law assumes mistakes will be made and focuses on intent. We make this distinction in other kinds of crimes, by the way: First-degree murder versus negligent homicide or manslaughter. Taking a machete and lopping off a woman's arm versus walking along with a machete, tripping, and doing the same--one's an accident, reckless perhaps, the other's intentional. Some people like taking into account intent, some people are suspicious of the very idea because somebody might get away with something, which would be cosmically unfair; in the last 50 years we've gone more vindictive and vengeance-driven, all zero-tolerance and looking at acts but not causes. My former boss' relative was in trouble because intent didn't matter--what he wrote down, for whatever reason, was factually incorrect; moreover, the investigator had to find somebody guilty in order to take the heat off the government official who approved the investment money--they had to blame the right person, in this case the easier political target.
Which goes back to the problem that of the three types of white-collar crime involved in the mortgage meltdown, we focus on the kind we can easily find, with money, and which are easier political targets. In fact, the reason for rejecting data disaggregation is because we have to find the right target for crimes--not the poor, not people of color (two separate but overlapping groups), but the rich and white.
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