“Nobody goes to jail,” notes Matt Taibbi. “This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail.”
“Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even ‘one dollar’ just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick ‘The Gorilla’ Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.”
— “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Tags: finance, financial collapse, financial crisis, financial meltdown, Matt Taibbi, recession, Rolling Stone, Taibbi, Wall Street
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