Sanders couldn't name one CEO that he would have sent to jail after the economic collapse

[MFrohike]

130. I'll bite

Sarbanes-Oxley signing statements regarding internal controls. At a minimum, John Thain of Merrill, Dick Fuld of Bear Stearns, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman, and Vikram Pandit of Citi should be in orange jumpsuits. Two of them ran their companies into the ground because they had no clue what their trading desks were doing, particularly Merrill with the largest trading loss of all time, and the other two because they only avoided complete catastrophe by frantic government intervention. Sarbanes-Oxley requires the CEO to sign off on adequate internal controls and it's pretty damn clear the evidence that none of these jokers did the first bit of their required due diligence.

Oh, Jamie Dimon should have joined them after the London Whale. It's pretty clear he wasn't paying the least bit of attention to what they were doing.

In addition to the above, both federal and state law provide for criminal liability for fraud. I'd think that a prosecutor worth a damn shouldn't have had a ton of trouble making that kind of case. Institutional investors were targeted by the securitizers for MBS and CDO sales. Those investors are usually required to invest in AAA bonds. The securitizers leaned hard on the ratings agencies, much as the originators did with appraisers, to game the ratings and get the securities into the required range for sale. This occurred whether the underlying loan pools or tranches were remotely sound. That sounds like a classic case of fraud to me. You have the deception via ratings, the detrimental reliance via the purchase, and the injury via the defaults.