8 ms·

He was so obnoxious that I guess it is easy to be happy about that, but he was so small time in the grand scheme of things. But nearly no bankers responsible f

He was so obnoxious that I guess it is easy to be happy about that, but he was so small time in the grand scheme of things. But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets-bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...

toomuchtodo 9y ago
One banker did. For 30 months. I think Shkreli was obnoxious and crude; the sentencing should've aligned with the crime. But America, so vengeance porn. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-ban...
- danso 9y ago
  He was also obnoxious and crude in a manner that made it near impossible for the judge to be generous in mitigating his sentence with regards to acceptance of responsibility. He couldn't even wait for an hour after being convicted before going on YouTube and bragging about how he thought he wouldn't face any prison time: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fail-to-corral-bragging-pharma-bro-ahead-of-sentencing-2017-08-05 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fa...
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    How dare he post on YouTube! 7 years in jail! This is clearly giving an unpopular person an unnecessarily harsh penalty. This is a corruption of justice.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
birken 9y ago
Like it or hate it, this is what the SEC does. You think Martha Stewart deserved jail time for making 50k in an insider trading scheme she didn't really care about? The SEC finds very public cases and then brings the hammer down in order to act a deterrent. Martin Shkreli broke the law, something he didn't have to do. It isn't like it was mob justice and some hugely biased jury convicted him of all the crimes he was committed of without thought. The jury by all accounts fairly deliberated his actions and convicted him of crimes that he did, while letting him off for crimes he didn't do. Then all Shkreli had to do was show some remorese and kiss the ring a little bit, but he continued to be a troll and mock the justice system. He downplayed his crimes literally minutes after being convicted of them, which showed a lack of remorse (and maybe honestly so, but the justice system doesn't like that). He continued to be a troll, including the whole Hillary Clinton incident, many of these statements used against him in sentencing. This isn't a case of the tall blades of grass getting cut first. It's a case where we have a subjective justice system that doesn't want to be mocked while it is doing it's job. Shkreli went out of his way to mock it, he went out of his way to mock the SEC, all the while he actually did commit a crime. Yes, it is a witch hunt in that the SEC will throw the book at some people while letting other people who committed worse crimes off the hook (Phil Mickelson vs Martha Stewart), but that how any limited investigative body works. If you don't want to be a target of a witch hunt, don't break the law. And if you do, kiss the ring. I'm not convinced it is a huge indictment of our society that people who break the law all the while trolling everybody get unfairly harsh punishments, though I admit it is unfair in the sense that life as a whole is unfair.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  The SEC, DOJ, et al also have limited amounts of resources. They just can't go after everyone.
  - presidentender 9y ago
    The fact that they can't go after everyone doesn't mean that they should punish Shkreli extra hard for what amounts to being a jerk.
brucephillips 9y ago
Nowhere in that article does it describe an actual crime that went unprosecuted. Shkreli broke the law. The financiers causing the financial collapse did not. Perhaps the laws should be changed.
- throwaway613834 9y ago
  I like how absolutely critical little 'details' like this get missed on HN so easily, by people speaking with extreme confidence. Thanks for the reality check!
- theo775 9y ago
  "The financiers causing the financial collapse did not." They weren't prosecuted. That doesn't mean they didn't break the law.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Likewise, just because they caused the financial collapse doesn't mean they broke the law.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) origination fraud is a crime. The GFC was not caused by law abiding activities. It was fraud, plain and simple. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion-historic-justice-department-settlement-financial-fraud-leading https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion... As part of the RMBS Working Group, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey conducted a FIRREA investigation into misrepresentations made by Merrill Lynch to investors in 72 RMBS throughout 2006 and 2007. As the statement of facts describes, Merrill Lynch regularly told investors the loans it was securitizing were made to borrowers who were likely and able to repay their debts. Merrill Lynch made these representations even though it knew, based on the due diligence it had performed on samples of the loans, that a significant number of those loans had material underwriting and compliance defects - including as many as 55 percent in a single pool. In addition, Merrill Lynch rarely reviewed the unsampled loans to ensure that the defects observed in the samples were not present throughout the remainder of the pools. Merrill Lynch also disregarded its own due diligence and securitized loans that the due diligence vendors had identified as defective. This practice led one Merrill Lynch consultant to “wonder why we have due diligence performed” if Merrill Lynch was going to securitize the loans “regardless of issues.” Disclaimer: I was privy to this having known several mortgage underwriters who identified this fraud, and despite reporting it with extensive documentation (which I personally collated and delivered via FedEx) to the SEC, DOJ, and OCC, were ignored.
adventured 9y ago
> But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail That is a myth. Dozens of bankers were arrested and put in prison over crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis. That includes a number of bankers at large enterprises. It excludes the very top tier bankers, at the systemically important financial firms, who all managed to skate. It's not illegal, generally speaking, to make dumb investment decisions, and or to take a lot of risk, and lose money. The responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis is spread across both the public and private sector, from Congress & multiple Presidents to the Federal Reserve to hundreds of banks, thousands of bankers, and tens of thousands of mortgage brokers and realtors. Spurred on by low interest rates, it was collective financial insanity that millions of people willfully, cheerfully, participated in. "The idea that no bankers went to prison for crimes related to the financial crisis is a myth, according to the watchdog overseeing the federal government's bailout fund. There have been 35 bankers sentenced to prison, said Christy Goldsmith Romero, the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP), in a report to Congress released Thursday." "There have been 59 bankers convicted of crimes, including two executives at NOVA Bank in Philadelphia who were convicted on Wednesday of fraud conspiracy related to TARP funds. An additional 19 bankers have been charged with crimes, with many awaiting trials." http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/companies/bankers-prison/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/companies/bankers-priso...
- daxorid 9y ago
  Yes, some small-time traders were put away. The odd CEO or CFO of a bank that's decidedly not TBTF. The poor shmuck who gambled outside his capital allowances with house money. But if you are Jon Corzine - well, you can abscond with $1.2B of your customers' money, tell Congress you just don't know where it went, and then pay $5MM to avoid an embarrassing and inconvenient trial, all the while throwing that sucker Edie O'Brien under the bus for being dumb enough to miss that "getaway" at the Hamptons last year. (yes, this was a bit later than the 2008 blowup, but the cause and effect were the same) Or you can be Lloyd Blankfein, who testified to knowing full well that their MBS desk was shorting the very products they were selling to their clients with sales pitches containing materially false claims. But Lloyd is a great guy, and he's had a rough go if it what with losing his hair and all. So we're not even going to prosecute, er, actually, we won't even bother to investigate the captain of who was privvy to the fraud on his ship, but didn't technically commit the fraud himself. So we'll go after that dumb trader Fabrice Tourre instead. $800k is a pretty stiff fine for someone who earns double that in a year. I'm sure he'll learn his lesson. Or you could be Dick Fuld.... Perhaps you see a pattern here? In the 1980s, when regulators and prosecutors didn't regularly get together for drinks with each other at Valentino, over ONE THOUSAND bankers were convicted, with roughly a third going to prison, with an average sentence of 3.2 years for the crimes. Not only including, but ESPECIALLY the captains of the ships. And they went after EVERYTHING - even violations of campaign contributions laws unrelated to the S&L crisis itself. Fast-forward to today. For a crisis arguably MORE fraught with fraud, with substantially worse fallout for the country: 59 convictions. Most were traders, in security sales, or ran tiny local banks. ZERO of them were Wall Street C-suite, directors, vice presidents, or anyone else who signed off on the fraud at a higher-than-upper-management level. In most cases, regulators and prosecutors are hesitant to even INVESTIGATE. This is to say nothing of the fact that nearly all large Wall Street banks are regarded by Federal regulators as recidivist banks, meaning that they keep breaking the law, getting fined less than the profits made from the crime, and doing it again. And again. And again. Nobody at HSBC went to prison for facilitating the murder of thousands of Mexicans by cartels. And nobody ever will. There are plenty of statutes on the books to criminally prosecute the bankers responsible. But we won't. Because some people are more equal than others. These constant apologetics for the parasites are, frankly, sickening. Same with the constant apologetics for arbitrary enforcement of law. What exactly is the point of having laws if the existential importance of the criminal to a bank is a critical deciding factor in whether or not to investigate, charge, prosecute, or convict?
stevenh 9y ago
You think people should go to prison for being obnoxious?
- Retra 9y ago
  That's not what was said at all.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  Cases like this always use expressions like "showed a lack of remorse." It speaks to how likely they are to reoffend.
Angostura 9y ago
What were the specific laws that you believe the 2008 crash bankers broke?
- MaysonL 9y ago
  Fraud, securities fraud, and forgery would do as a start.
  - edanm 9y ago
    Who committed fraud, specifically? This always comes up and, while I agree that maybe things possibly weren't investigated enough, I don't think there are any clear examples of people who committed fraud and got away with it. A lot of people being stupid does not equal fraud.
    - beagle3 9y ago
      I recommend reading Karl Deninger at https://market-ticker.org/ https://market-ticker.org/ ; I don't know if his archive back to 2007 are available to non-subscribers, but he's been documenting these issues, quite well presented, since 2007. The bottom line is, for the 2007/8 crisis, there are hundreds if not thousands of people guilty of fraudulent misrepresentations, and for inventing their own laws, with no reprecussions. I think the most egregious case is the "robo-signing" and MERS case (which are intertwined), which appear to involve thousands of cases of perjury, non of which were prosecuted, or even investigated -- but the publicly available evidence is damning enough, even if no justice official decided to investigate. But why go back so far? So far, the recent wells fargo fraudulent account opening case [0] has resulted in a slap on the wrist and no one being charged. I don't know who committed fraud specifically, and it seems no one who can find out wishes to find out either. In 8 years, someone like you is going to ask "but who specifically committed fraud? this always comes up". There are clear examples of fraud; if there aren't clear examples of who committed that fraud, it is only because the powers that be decided they do not want to know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal#Effects_on_Wells_Fargo_and_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
    - 9y ago
kbenson 9y ago
The interesting thing about this casae, if I recall the facts correctly (I'm sure someone will fact check this, I'll attempt to and update this in a bit), is that in this case the breaking of the law was mostly an attempt to make sure his investors were left whole. Here's the facts as I understand them: 1) He ran a hedge fund, and lost a lot of money. 2) He didn't disclose to his investors that he lost the money, and falsified reports. 3) In an effort to make sure people didn't lose money (whether to protect himself or to make sure his investors were made whole) he took profits from another company he ran and used them to pay these investors. 4) Almost all investors in the hedge fund ended up making a profit because of this. It's fairly easy to interpret this as someone that screwed up bad, and then broke the law to cover it up and try to make it right, and by lucky happenstance was actually able to get people's money back, but still ended up breaking the law. That's a fairly good story to have, and I would think lends itself towards a mitigated sentence. On the other hand, he repeatedly presented himself in an unsympathetic way that antagonized the judge and the regulatory bodies involved. It is, to put it mildly, a fairly complex and (to my layman eyes) unique situation, compounded by the fact that his behavior may or may not have to do with being socially inept (is it right to punish someone for a social disability, if that is indeed the case here?) There was a discussion about this when the guilty verdict was announced[1]. Much of my info comes from that article and this other one[1] from the same time period. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14931004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14931004 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-shkreli-guilty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-...
- loggedinmyphone 9y ago
  Punishment seldom if ever fits the crime. There's a strong case that punishment exists to give society a chance for collective catharsis. Otherwise it makes little sense to imprison someone for 7 years. If they can be rehabilitated then do so; if they need to be removed from society permanently then do that. Public ostentatious punishment is really a form of vicarious group sadism directed at the unpopular.
purplezooey 9y ago
Excellent point. 0 bankers went to jail (other than that one BofA dude). One of the great travesties of this decade.
jjeaff 9y ago
Which laws did the bankers break? The 2008 financial crisis was very complex and had many bad actors on many sides, but the majority of outright fraud was committed by small time mortgage originators (or employees of large originators) and the individual homeowners who lied to get loans.

toomuchtodo 9y ago

One banker did. For 30 months. I think Shkreli was obnoxious and crude; the sentencing should've aligned with the crime. But America, so vengeance porn. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-ban...

danso 9y ago
He was also obnoxious and crude in a manner that made it near impossible for the judge to be generous in mitigating his sentence with regards to acceptance of responsibility. He couldn't even wait for an hour after being convicted before going on YouTube and bragging about how he thought he wouldn't face any prison time: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fail-to-corral-bragging-pharma-bro-ahead-of-sentencing-2017-08-05 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fa...
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  How dare he post on YouTube! 7 years in jail! This is clearly giving an unpopular person an unnecessarily harsh penalty. This is a corruption of justice.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

birken 9y ago

Like it or hate it, this is what the SEC does. You think Martha Stewart deserved jail time for making 50k in an insider trading scheme she didn't really care about? The SEC finds very public cases and then brings the hammer down in order to act a deterrent. Martin Shkreli broke the law, something he didn't have to do. It isn't like it was mob justice and some hugely biased jury convicted him of all the crimes he was committed of without thought. The jury by all accounts fairly deliberated his actions and convicted him of crimes that he did, while letting him off for crimes he didn't do. Then all Shkreli had to do was show some remorese and kiss the ring a little bit, but he continued to be a troll and mock the justice system. He downplayed his crimes literally minutes after being convicted of them, which showed a lack of remorse (and maybe honestly so, but the justice system doesn't like that). He continued to be a troll, including the whole Hillary Clinton incident, many of these statements used against him in sentencing. This isn't a case of the tall blades of grass getting cut first. It's a case where we have a subjective justice system that doesn't want to be mocked while it is doing it's job. Shkreli went out of his way to mock it, he went out of his way to mock the SEC, all the while he actually did commit a crime. Yes, it is a witch hunt in that the SEC will throw the book at some people while letting other people who committed worse crimes off the hook (Phil Mickelson vs Martha Stewart), but that how any limited investigative body works. If you don't want to be a target of a witch hunt, don't break the law. And if you do, kiss the ring. I'm not convinced it is a huge indictment of our society that people who break the law all the while trolling everybody get unfairly harsh punishments, though I admit it is unfair in the sense that life as a whole is unfair.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
The SEC, DOJ, et al also have limited amounts of resources. They just can't go after everyone.
- presidentender 9y ago
  The fact that they can't go after everyone doesn't mean that they should punish Shkreli extra hard for what amounts to being a jerk.

brucephillips 9y ago

Nowhere in that article does it describe an actual crime that went unprosecuted. Shkreli broke the law. The financiers causing the financial collapse did not. Perhaps the laws should be changed.

throwaway613834 9y ago
I like how absolutely critical little 'details' like this get missed on HN so easily, by people speaking with extreme confidence. Thanks for the reality check!
theo775 9y ago
"The financiers causing the financial collapse did not." They weren't prosecuted. That doesn't mean they didn't break the law.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Likewise, just because they caused the financial collapse doesn't mean they broke the law.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) origination fraud is a crime. The GFC was not caused by law abiding activities. It was fraud, plain and simple. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion-historic-justice-department-settlement-financial-fraud-leading https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bank-america-pay-1665-billion... As part of the RMBS Working Group, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey conducted a FIRREA investigation into misrepresentations made by Merrill Lynch to investors in 72 RMBS throughout 2006 and 2007. As the statement of facts describes, Merrill Lynch regularly told investors the loans it was securitizing were made to borrowers who were likely and able to repay their debts. Merrill Lynch made these representations even though it knew, based on the due diligence it had performed on samples of the loans, that a significant number of those loans had material underwriting and compliance defects - including as many as 55 percent in a single pool. In addition, Merrill Lynch rarely reviewed the unsampled loans to ensure that the defects observed in the samples were not present throughout the remainder of the pools. Merrill Lynch also disregarded its own due diligence and securitized loans that the due diligence vendors had identified as defective. This practice led one Merrill Lynch consultant to “wonder why we have due diligence performed” if Merrill Lynch was going to securitize the loans “regardless of issues.” Disclaimer: I was privy to this having known several mortgage underwriters who identified this fraud, and despite reporting it with extensive documentation (which I personally collated and delivered via FedEx) to the SEC, DOJ, and OCC, were ignored.

adventured 9y ago

> But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail That is a myth. Dozens of bankers were arrested and put in prison over crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis. That includes a number of bankers at large enterprises. It excludes the very top tier bankers, at the systemically important financial firms, who all managed to skate. It's not illegal, generally speaking, to make dumb investment decisions, and or to take a lot of risk, and lose money. The responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis is spread across both the public and private sector, from Congress & multiple Presidents to the Federal Reserve to hundreds of banks, thousands of bankers, and tens of thousands of mortgage brokers and realtors. Spurred on by low interest rates, it was collective financial insanity that millions of people willfully, cheerfully, participated in. "The idea that no bankers went to prison for crimes related to the financial crisis is a myth, according to the watchdog overseeing the federal government's bailout fund. There have been 35 bankers sentenced to prison, said Christy Goldsmith Romero, the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP), in a report to Congress released Thursday." "There have been 59 bankers convicted of crimes, including two executives at NOVA Bank in Philadelphia who were convicted on Wednesday of fraud conspiracy related to TARP funds. An additional 19 bankers have been charged with crimes, with many awaiting trials." http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/companies/bankers-prison/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/28/news/companies/bankers-priso...

daxorid 9y ago
Yes, some small-time traders were put away. The odd CEO or CFO of a bank that's decidedly not TBTF. The poor shmuck who gambled outside his capital allowances with house money. But if you are Jon Corzine - well, you can abscond with $1.2B of your customers' money, tell Congress you just don't know where it went, and then pay $5MM to avoid an embarrassing and inconvenient trial, all the while throwing that sucker Edie O'Brien under the bus for being dumb enough to miss that "getaway" at the Hamptons last year. (yes, this was a bit later than the 2008 blowup, but the cause and effect were the same) Or you can be Lloyd Blankfein, who testified to knowing full well that their MBS desk was shorting the very products they were selling to their clients with sales pitches containing materially false claims. But Lloyd is a great guy, and he's had a rough go if it what with losing his hair and all. So we're not even going to prosecute, er, actually, we won't even bother to investigate the captain of who was privvy to the fraud on his ship, but didn't technically commit the fraud himself. So we'll go after that dumb trader Fabrice Tourre instead. $800k is a pretty stiff fine for someone who earns double that in a year. I'm sure he'll learn his lesson. Or you could be Dick Fuld.... Perhaps you see a pattern here? In the 1980s, when regulators and prosecutors didn't regularly get together for drinks with each other at Valentino, over ONE THOUSAND bankers were convicted, with roughly a third going to prison, with an average sentence of 3.2 years for the crimes. Not only including, but ESPECIALLY the captains of the ships. And they went after EVERYTHING - even violations of campaign contributions laws unrelated to the S&L crisis itself. Fast-forward to today. For a crisis arguably MORE fraught with fraud, with substantially worse fallout for the country: 59 convictions. Most were traders, in security sales, or ran tiny local banks. ZERO of them were Wall Street C-suite, directors, vice presidents, or anyone else who signed off on the fraud at a higher-than-upper-management level. In most cases, regulators and prosecutors are hesitant to even INVESTIGATE. This is to say nothing of the fact that nearly all large Wall Street banks are regarded by Federal regulators as recidivist banks, meaning that they keep breaking the law, getting fined less than the profits made from the crime, and doing it again. And again. And again. Nobody at HSBC went to prison for facilitating the murder of thousands of Mexicans by cartels. And nobody ever will. There are plenty of statutes on the books to criminally prosecute the bankers responsible. But we won't. Because some people are more equal than others. These constant apologetics for the parasites are, frankly, sickening. Same with the constant apologetics for arbitrary enforcement of law. What exactly is the point of having laws if the existential importance of the criminal to a bank is a critical deciding factor in whether or not to investigate, charge, prosecute, or convict?

stevenh 9y ago

You think people should go to prison for being obnoxious?

Retra 9y ago
That's not what was said at all.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
Cases like this always use expressions like "showed a lack of remorse." It speaks to how likely they are to reoffend.

Angostura 9y ago

What were the specific laws that you believe the 2008 crash bankers broke?

MaysonL 9y ago
Fraud, securities fraud, and forgery would do as a start.
- edanm 9y ago
  Who committed fraud, specifically? This always comes up and, while I agree that maybe things possibly weren't investigated enough, I don't think there are any clear examples of people who committed fraud and got away with it. A lot of people being stupid does not equal fraud.
  - beagle3 9y ago
    I recommend reading Karl Deninger at https://market-ticker.org/ https://market-ticker.org/ ; I don't know if his archive back to 2007 are available to non-subscribers, but he's been documenting these issues, quite well presented, since 2007. The bottom line is, for the 2007/8 crisis, there are hundreds if not thousands of people guilty of fraudulent misrepresentations, and for inventing their own laws, with no reprecussions. I think the most egregious case is the "robo-signing" and MERS case (which are intertwined), which appear to involve thousands of cases of perjury, non of which were prosecuted, or even investigated -- but the publicly available evidence is damning enough, even if no justice official decided to investigate. But why go back so far? So far, the recent wells fargo fraudulent account opening case [0] has resulted in a slap on the wrist and no one being charged. I don't know who committed fraud specifically, and it seems no one who can find out wishes to find out either. In 8 years, someone like you is going to ask "but who specifically committed fraud? this always comes up". There are clear examples of fraud; if there aren't clear examples of who committed that fraud, it is only because the powers that be decided they do not want to know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scandal#Effects_on_Wells_Fargo_and_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
  - 9y ago

kbenson 9y ago

The interesting thing about this casae, if I recall the facts correctly (I'm sure someone will fact check this, I'll attempt to and update this in a bit), is that in this case the breaking of the law was mostly an attempt to make sure his investors were left whole. Here's the facts as I understand them: 1) He ran a hedge fund, and lost a lot of money. 2) He didn't disclose to his investors that he lost the money, and falsified reports. 3) In an effort to make sure people didn't lose money (whether to protect himself or to make sure his investors were made whole) he took profits from another company he ran and used them to pay these investors. 4) Almost all investors in the hedge fund ended up making a profit because of this. It's fairly easy to interpret this as someone that screwed up bad, and then broke the law to cover it up and try to make it right, and by lucky happenstance was actually able to get people's money back, but still ended up breaking the law. That's a fairly good story to have, and I would think lends itself towards a mitigated sentence. On the other hand, he repeatedly presented himself in an unsympathetic way that antagonized the judge and the regulatory bodies involved. It is, to put it mildly, a fairly complex and (to my layman eyes) unique situation, compounded by the fact that his behavior may or may not have to do with being socially inept (is it right to punish someone for a social disability, if that is indeed the case here?) There was a discussion about this when the guilty verdict was announced[1]. Much of my info comes from that article and this other one[1] from the same time period. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14931004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14931004 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-shkreli-guilty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/dealbook/martin-...

loggedinmyphone 9y ago
Punishment seldom if ever fits the crime. There's a strong case that punishment exists to give society a chance for collective catharsis. Otherwise it makes little sense to imprison someone for 7 years. If they can be rehabilitated then do so; if they need to be removed from society permanently then do that. Public ostentatious punishment is really a form of vicarious group sadism directed at the unpopular.

purplezooey 9y ago

Excellent point. 0 bankers went to jail (other than that one BofA dude). One of the great travesties of this decade.

jjeaff 9y ago

Which laws did the bankers break? The 2008 financial crisis was very complex and had many bad actors on many sides, but the majority of outright fraud was committed by small time mortgage originators (or employees of large originators) and the individual homeowners who lied to get loans.