Thursday, September 24, 2015

Still waiting for the perp walk


Do you think that justice has been done to the people who did all the bad things that created the 2008 financial meltdown?

Think again.

In the September issue of The Atlantic, William Cohan lays out the bad and the ugly about “How The Bankers Stayed Out of Jail.” Read it here.

Here’s the short version:
Since that horribly destructive financial crisis, 49 banks and other financial institutions have paid almost $190 billion (yeah, that’s BILLION) in fines and regulatory settlements. All of the payments came out of their shareholders’ pockets. Some of the penalty payments were tax-deductible (!).

How many Wall Street executives and other big players have gone to jail for their manifest misdeeds?

One.

Cohan mentions, for comparison, that in the aftermath of the U. S. savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than a thousand bank execs and others went to jail for their crimes that drained $132 billion from taxpayers’ pockets.


I think it’s going to be a long wait for the perp walk.

(While I think of it, I’ll guess it could be a long wait to find out which Volkswagen executives and managers go to jail for tampering with their diesel cars’ emission control systems.)







Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

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