Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's this trope about us choosing to not throw people in jail but its just a consequence of needing real evidence against a person. Holder made some ckmment to the line of " if we had the evidence , people at the DOJ would be rushing to charge. Throwing a Wall St exec in jail is a career-making case" (edit: actual quote https://mobile.twitter.com/lauraolin/status/7279880874149847... ) The interests are totally ali…
How come we could find that evidence for all sorts of people, up to and including CEOs, after the S&L crisis? DOJ chose not to prosecute because of what? The way to do it is to pick a small fish, roll him, roll the guys he implicates, etc. Worked then, would have worked now.
The perspective of Bill Black, senior regulator and litigator during the S&L crisis:
"So at the peak of the savings and loans crisis — again, one-seventieth the size of this crisis — of those 2,300 total FBI agents, 1,000 of them were working on just one industry, the savings and loan industry, to produce that incredible wave of success that we had. As recently as fiscal year 2007, there were only 120 FBI agents assigned to mortgage fraud, and that’s despite the fact that the FBI itself, in September 2004, warned that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud — ‘epidemic’ was their word — and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis — ‘crisis’ was their word — unless it was stopped."
"And what people don’t understand about the criminal justice system is there are roughly a million people employed in it — and of course, millions incarcerated in it. But of the million employees, 2,300 do elite white-collar investigations. And of those 2,300, you have to contrast that to the number of industries in the United States, which is over 1,300."
http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-exe...