Jim Hightower Quotes

Actually a few minor characters were prosecuted for financial crimes committed during that period but none were prosecuted whose behavior caused or accelerated the meltdown, and no bank officers were prosecuted despite the FBI reporting that hundreds of thousands of Mortgage Foreclosure involved perjury by bank officers in a pattern that was used by most of the large major banks. The Obama administration was in the dilemma of either choosing one or two bank officers of whom to make an example or if all those who had committed serious crimes were prosecutors, it would involve thousands of the officers of almost every major bank and tens of thousands of officials and mortgage related firms. These were among the wealthiest and most influential people in the country, and there would be few left to build the American Banking System back up when that was one of our most important national priorities. They were also amongst the largest political contributors to both political parties. So the government bailed the bankers out financially, allowed them to maintain million dollar of more salaries and bonuses, and gave the entire batch of people who broke the law a de facto immunity from criminal prosecution. A further complicating factor was that many of the most egregious, greedy, and publicly harmful were not illegal as a result of much change in the law as a part of financial deregulation or were new schemes that the financial industry had successfully lobbied to prevent regulation as with Derivatives.

The then attorney general had begun a series of investigation which discovered that most of the major Wall Street brokerage houses were engaged in systematic frauds to cheat small investors. One dramatic fraud he uncovered was that the research expert analysts of major firms would recommend the stock of businesses that their firm was doing investment banking for even when they knew that the companies were not doing well or were even in deep financial trouble. See {627544}.

Congress had passed special legislation making crimes at the Mint capital crimes.

Barry Bonds was a star professional baseball player whose accomplishments were aided by taking illegal drugs. He lied about his use of drugs, and the Department made a very large effort over years to finally prosecute him. However during that time there were almost no prosecutions of the thousands of bankers and financiers who had lied, cheated, forged legal documents and in the process almost permanently ruined the American economy—the Great Recession of 2008. The Justice Department claimed that white collar cases are very complex and take longer to prepare prosecutions. Critics claimed that there are so many law breakers, that the government does not want to prosecute all the felons, but just go after a few, and this is easier if time has gone by and public anger has receded or been forgotten.

In the economic meltdown of 2008 and the aftermath, there were so many criminal violations of law in the financial industry that even the Democratic administration of Barack Obama chose not to jail the violators but to levy some large token fines albeit ones which were very affordable for the institutions who had to pay them—in many cases paying them with money made as a result of profits on no-interest money they received in bailouts after the 2008 Meltdown.

The Senator asked Justice Department officials if the reason that there had been no prosecutions of any major financial figures associated with the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession is that they were “too big to jail.” This appears to be the first public official to use this phrase. See {637991} for the Attorney General’s sad but truthful reply.

At this time it was 6 years after the Home Financing Crisis and the Meltdown of 2008 and despite tens of thousands of law violations by the bank, the Justice Department was finally finishing their investigations and requiring some penalties. Other negotiations with other banks were in progress, but no bank executives were going to jail for the millions they handled fraudulently, whereas a burglar who stole household goods would do jail time.