Yes, some small-time traders were put away. The odd CEO or CFO of a bank that's decidedly not TBTF. The poor shmuck who gambled outside his capital allowances with house money.
But if you are Jon Corzine - well, you can abscond with $1.2B of your customers' money, tell Congress you just don't know where it went, and then pay $5MM to avoid an embarrassing and inconvenient trial, all the while throwing that sucker Edie O'Brien under the bus for being dumb enough to miss that "getaway" at the Hamptons last year. (yes, this was a bit later than the 2008 blowup, but the cause and effect were the same)
Or you can be Lloyd Blankfein, who testified to knowing full well that their MBS desk was shorting the very products they were selling to their clients with sales pitches containing materially false claims. But Lloyd is a great guy, and he's had a rough go if it what with losing his hair and all. So we're not even going to prosecute, er, actually, we won't even bother to investigate the captain of who was privvy to the fraud on his ship, but didn't technically commit the fraud himself. So we'll go after that dumb trader Fabrice Tourre instead. $800k is a pretty stiff fine for someone who earns double that in a year. I'm sure he'll learn his lesson.
Or you could be Dick Fuld....
Perhaps you see a pattern here?
In the 1980s, when regulators and prosecutors didn't regularly get together for drinks with each other at Valentino, over ONE THOUSAND bankers were convicted, with roughly a third going to prison, with an average sentence of 3.2 years for the crimes. Not only including, but ESPECIALLY the captains of the ships.
And they went after EVERYTHING - even violations of campaign contributions laws unrelated to the S&L crisis itself.
Fast-forward to today. For a crisis arguably MORE fraught with fraud, with substantially worse fallout for the country: 59 convictions. Most were traders, in security sales, or ran tiny local banks. ZERO of them were Wall Street C-suite, directors, vice presidents, or anyone else who signed off on the fraud at a higher-than-upper-management level.
In most cases, regulators and prosecutors are hesitant to even INVESTIGATE.
This is to say nothing of the fact that nearly all large Wall Street banks are regarded by Federal regulators as recidivist banks, meaning that they keep breaking the law, getting fined less than the profits made from the crime, and doing it again. And again. And again.
Nobody at HSBC went to prison for facilitating the murder of thousands of Mexicans by cartels. And nobody ever will. There are plenty of statutes on the books to criminally prosecute the bankers responsible. But we won't. Because some people are more equal than others.
These constant apologetics for the parasites are, frankly, sickening.
Same with the constant apologetics for arbitrary enforcement of law. What exactly is the point of having laws if the existential importance of the criminal to a bank is a critical deciding factor in whether or not to investigate, charge, prosecute, or convict?