3 ms·
It was not failure. It was at the very least gross negligence, if not outright theft and fraud.
by imgabe 8y ago
It was not failure. It was at the very least gross negligence, if not outright theft and fraud.
- pas 8y agoCivil society decided that retroactive application of laws is a very bad idea. So prevention is the name of the game. But that requires competent regulators and oversight. Compliance and reporting laws, and so on. Investigators with staff and time, prosecutors willing to chase a case, and of course independent judges. The SEC and DoJ could have tried to bring more charges, and they got billions in deferred prosecution agreements, maybe not enough though. (They - I mean DPAs - are not shiny like a jail time verdict, but they do work pretty well https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/soci-t-g-n-rale-sa-agrees-pay-860-million-criminal-penalties-bribing-gaddafi-era-libyan https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/soci-t-g-n-rale-sa-agrees-pay... see also https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1377&context=ncbi https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsred... ) If we want to make up for the money lost by the innocent, then we can chose to tax those we think benefited. But that's completely different than blind vengeance.
- imgabe 8y agoIt would not have to be retroactive. I don't believe that there weren't existing laws violated that could have been pursued. For instance, there's a documentary called "Small Enough To Jail" about Abacus bank - a small family run bank that was the only one to be prosecuted for mortgage fraud due to NINJA loans, although practically every bank was doing this at the time. That's just one example.