People tend to go to jail for malice (willful intent), not mistakes. The financial crisis was viewed as just a giant mistake in risk management. having a 20-sigma event when your financial model says it is an impossibility, is not a crime.
Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
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Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#52These stories all seem to ride on similar popular sentiments: 'bad things happened, and rich people were involved, so they should go to jail'. Having read a few of the books cited at the bottom, I have been repeatedly surprised at how these financial disasters came to be; it often seems like the people at the top were deceiving themselves more than anyone else. Bethany McLean's other book, "The Smartest Guys in the R…
In many other jobs, gross negligence resulting in billions of dollars of property damage can get you jail time. Why is it ok for the people at the top of these financial disasters to be immune? Whether they're deceiving themselves is irrelevant. Drunk drivers deceive themselves about their ability to drive safely, we still put them in jail.
> In many other jobs, gross negligence resulting in billions of dollars of property damage can get you jail time.
Can it? Say I design a bridge, it falls down and kills people, and does a large amount of economic damage in the process (maybe it falls on a chemical factory which explodes, or something). I'm fired, sure. I probably never work as an engineer again. I'm very unpopular, and my name becomes an insult. But do I go to jail?
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#53These stories all seem to ride on similar popular sentiments: 'bad things happened, and rich people were involved, so they should go to jail'. Having read a few of the books cited at the bottom, I have been repeatedly surprised at how these financial disasters came to be; it often seems like the people at the top were deceiving themselves more than anyone else. Bethany McLean's other book, "The Smartest Guys in the R…
I think the sentiment is more "The rich have created this financial system that's essentially a giant casino, where if they make a bet and are right, they profit, and if they make a bet and are wrong, the general public loses their jobs and 401(k)s while the government pays to bail them (the rich) out. The fact that none of it appears to even be criminal is just icing on the cake and shows who the law really protects…
>"If none of the actions that caused all that misery are actually crimes, that's the problem. "
Why? Why should the stock market be further de-risked? Why should the government's poor impulse control be encouraged? Why should mistakes be criminalized?
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#54FYI The actual article is audio/podcast. I skimmed through it and it was considered more effective to go after individuals by civil suite. My personal understanding is a lot that the fraud was widespread among low level mortgage officers (not sure if that's the right word) who were doing things like exagerating a loan applicants income, assets, etc. These individuals may or may not have known the extent of their crim…
When it's a handful of people, you go after the individuals. When it's wide spread, you go after the institution [1]. The challenge is that the DOJ appears to continue to insist on going after white collar crimes like these with civil penalties against the company rather than piercing the corporate veil & starting to criminally prosecute the officers responsible. Talk about moral hazards they're constantly hand wring…
You see the same pattern of behavior with the IRS, where they've determined it's easier to go after individuals committing tax offenses rather than massive corporations.
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at the scale noted in the article I linked: > Mortgage originators that emphasized profit-fueled quantity over loan quality, which resulted in the misreporting of key financial information in 48% of loans securitized by nongovernment agencies; If 48% of your company's financial transactions were fraudulent, would you expect the CEO to bear responsibility for that? At that point, I'd expect to see a RICO case, or…
The corruption may be rampant but those aren't "Wall Street" jobs. Countrywide was based out of Calabasas, California.
There's no way half the loans in a portfolio are fraudulent, and that doesn't get noticed. That includes by the Wall Street firms that are repackaging and securitizing them as CDOs and CDSs. At some point, in a functioning system, that does attract the attention of the CEO.
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#56Articles like this never seem to make the case for which crimes were specificly commited. They always talk about the fallout of the financial crisis (losing money on wall street isnt a crime afaik). Idk much about this topic, so im sure crimes could be involved, but its weird how these articles dont start with why didn't someone go to jail for .
Sure. Lets start with an easy example. Why didnt any Directors at Goldman Sachs serve prison time for knowingly bundling Synthetic CDOs with bad CDS that they internally know were garbage? They sold these to pension funds, and other public entities. There were documented losses. There are documented emails with full internal discussion on how bad these investments were. (documented with emails.) Note there was a civi…
The message that was drilled into people during the financial crisis was: punishing people for these actions would stifle innovation and risk taking in the financial services, which could threaten US financial hegemony.
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#57These stories all seem to ride on similar popular sentiments: 'bad things happened, and rich people were involved, so they should go to jail'. Having read a few of the books cited at the bottom, I have been repeatedly surprised at how these financial disasters came to be; it often seems like the people at the top were deceiving themselves more than anyone else. Bethany McLean's other book, "The Smartest Guys in the R…
You conveniently cite the case where the perpetrators were also fooling themselves. What about the case where the perpetrators were saying on thing publicly and privately betting against their products?
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html
(fast forward to real life -- Princeton grads at Goldman Sachs dont go to jail...)
Excerpt from article:
A handful of investors and Wall Street traders, however, anticipated the crisis. In 2006, Wall Street had introduced a new index, called the ABX, that became a way to invest in the direction of mortgage securities. The index allowed traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk characteristics, just as stock indexes enable traders to bet on whether the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or down.
Goldman, among others on Wall Street, has said since the collapse that it made big money by using the ABX to bet against the housing market. Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly.
Even before then, however, pockets of the investment bank had also started using C.D.O.’s to place bets against mortgage securities, in some cases to hedge the firm’s mortgage investments, as protection against a fall in housing prices and an increase in defaults.
Mr. Egol was a prime mover behind these securities.
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth noting that if you were going to go after loan fraud you likely would be charging low level folks in the mortgage pipeline (appraisers, mortgage brokers, etc) or even the borrowers, not Wall Street CEOs.
You dont necessarily need to charge the Wall Street CEOs. You can charge the Senior Managing Director of Structured Products. Or MD of Structured Products banking/trading/risk/whatever. There were plenty of individuals who set policy to enable this. No need for a scarecrow argument about CEO or bust. I could literally look thru Linked In or a Bloomberg Terminal and figure out who the responsible parties are. Too bad…
What do you charge them with? They were effectively lied to about the underlying assets that went into the securities.
Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#59Articles like this never seem to make the case for which crimes were specificly commited. They always talk about the fallout of the financial crisis (losing money on wall street isnt a crime afaik). Idk much about this topic, so im sure crimes could be involved, but its weird how these articles dont start with why didn't someone go to jail for .
Sure. Lets start with an easy example. Why didnt any Directors at Goldman Sachs serve prison time for knowingly bundling Synthetic CDOs with bad CDS that they internally know were garbage? They sold these to pension funds, and other public entities. There were documented losses. There are documented emails with full internal discussion on how bad these investments were. (documented with emails.) Note there was a civi…
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Re: Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)
#60Articles like this never seem to make the case for which crimes were specificly commited. They always talk about the fallout of the financial crisis (losing money on wall street isnt a crime afaik). Idk much about this topic, so im sure crimes could be involved, but its weird how these articles dont start with why didn't someone go to jail for .
The focus on whether specific crimes were or were not committed is weird to me — as if people from these companies didn't help write the laws that are supposed to regulate this stuff in the first place.
These people gambled with the economy, lost trillions of dollars and destroyed the lives and savings of millions of people… and then got bailed out by the federal government. Who cares whether they committed specific crimes? The issue is the "heads we win, tails you lose" system, in which if you're wealthy enough you can break the world economy and get rewarded for it.