“Wall Street did not accidentally run a barge aground and leave a small oil slick on the Hudson River. Wall Street did not accidentally release tainted lettuce that sickened a few dozen people.
What Wall Street did was intentional and criminal: it financially engineered a toxic subprime house of cards which it knew from its own internal reviews was going to collapse; it then molded the toxic product into inscrutable bundles; it sold the bundles to unsuspecting investors around the globe while making side bets that it would all come crashing down.
Then, after causing the greatest financial collapse in the United States since the Great Depression, Wall Street’s unrepentant scoundrels paid themselves billions of dollars in bonuses with taxpayer bailout funds.”
Pam and Russ Martens, Wall Street On Parade
Pretty good summary. Even more twisted is that the “regulators” all knew what was going on and what was going to happen, though they all feigned ignorance after the fact.
…and to my knowledge nobody went to prison.
The government (an it’s PolitiBeasts) regulated it, encouraged it, benefitted from it, made money from it, paid for it, and set them up to do it again. Why is anyone surprised it’s happening again?
here it is on a smaller scale–an article about the wells fargo scandals–
why no one has been arrested and states have not revoked their business licenses is beyond me–