Baffling. You can't even get a Mafia don for something his hit man did, unless you can prove the don was involved. RICO isn't a license to throw people in jail

Baffling. You can't even get a Mafia don for something his hit man did, unless you can prove the don was involved. RICO isn't a license to throw people in jail because of some hand-waving about responsibility. I don't think the law works how you think it works. When you talk about HSBC officers you're talking about things probably >90% of them didn't even intend to happen, much less had any provable connection to. Even actual bad guys are hard to put in jail, never mind if this stuff about blaming bank executives for everything has any significant merit. I'm double baffled that you think the mortgage officer example--the harried guy in a cheap suit overlooking some fudged numbers here and there--is at all comparable to a drug dealer or a hit man, both of whom knowingly destroy people for a living with their different weapons. Liberty Reserve is a poor counter-example because the Liberty Reserve guys allegedly laundered billions of dollars, on purpose, provably knowing they were doing it, in fact setting up an illegal business offshore so they could do it. If the allegations are true there's no doubt they are actual bad guys. Oh, and it took a two year long international effort to bring them down. And I remember there being some HN indignation when Liberty Reserve was taken down, which is ironic when you compare how angry people are about HSBC doing much less. Imagine the response if Liberty Reserve was owned by Goldman Sachs!