Top official negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has RESIGNED over bribery charges

[1StrongBlackMan]

74. First...

The more meaningful number is how many Wall Street executives have gone to jail for playing a part in the crisis. That number is one. (Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse, is serving a 30-month sentence for inflating the value of mortgage bonds in his trading portfolio, allowing them to appear more valuable than they really were.) By way of contrast, following the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than 1,000 bankers of all stripes were jailed for their transgressions.

This is exactly what I'm talking about ... First, both, the laws and the enforcement mechanisms have changed significantly since the '80s (and except for Dodd-Franks, not towards more enforcement). Comparing the two eras is like comparing liquor arrests in the 20s to those of today.

And of course a lot of cases now have the statue of limitations expired since they let these guys go, so they're getting off scott free

It's hard to argue against this point because you have yet to answer the "Prosecution of Who" and "For What" question; but, you are in good company ... no one has, including this article writer.

The fact is, the civil settlements reflect, not some corruption of law enforcement; but rather, the realities of criminal law enforcement ... in American jurisprudence the burdens of proof are far lower under civil prosecutions than under criminal, with in the latter, there must be specific facts developed against specific individuals. And the corporate structure is designed, exactly, to insulate the top individuals from the facts of the "crimes" that may have been done below.

That said, and after nearly 10 years of looking at this, I could identify only one high profile banker that could possibly be criminally prosecuted ... that would be Jamie Dimon, and for the (relatively) minor crime of knowingly signing an inaccurate corporate governance document required under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 ... which is/was, only, tangentially related to the melt-down.

On another note, all this "send the bankers to jail" talk betrays a fundamental misunderstanding/ignorance of financial/corporate criminality (that civil penalties recognizes), i.e., the threat of prison is NOT an effective deterrent to financial/corporate crimes ... again, it is the nature of the legal fiction of corporations to survive the death/removal of individuals (i.e., the jailing of individual CEOs/bankers will leave the corporation, wholly, unaffected); whereas, absent a corporate "death penalty" (which is largely non-existent in law), civil penalties do affect the corporations. (Note: While the number reached for the penalties has been/may be too low to have been effective, that is a different discussion.)