Why Wall Street Isn’t In Jail
Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy—but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them, says Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone Magazine.
Federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice.
