Most of the Wall Street scams that triggered what The Economist would decry as "populist" outrage in recent years weren't just morally despicable, but bluntly illegal. Many were just skyscraper-level versions of street crimes.
A Mexican-American racetrack owner launders perhaps tens of millions for Mexican drug gangs and gets 20 years. HSBC does the same thing on a much grander scale and everyone walks.
In the mortgage fraud cases, companies knowingly sold defective products to institutional investors, pension funds being a classic customer. Whistleblowers told of executives who knew they were selling investors packets of home loans prone to default, and did it anyway.
[...]
In a non-corporate context, we'd consider this among the most serious kinds of crimes that we punish. What sentence would you want for someone who stole from your parents' retirement money? From your local teachers' union?
It's bad enough that the self-pitying jerks on Wall Street who read magazines like The Economist think that paying taxes or giving employees benefits or adhering to any labor or environmental standards are unconscionable burdens. Now we're supposed to be so grateful for their sociopathic pursuit of profits that we should excuse them from the criminal code, too?
Matt Taibbi
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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