Sure, the individuals committing crimes with easily provable signatures were small fry. But the instructions, incentives and 'wink wink you know' practices were coming down from the management. Nobody believes that all the mortgage brokers in America spontaneously began lying on their loans, or that management at e.g Countrywide was blissfully unaware of it happening. They were doing this in the company's name and a company that allows (/encourages) this to happen should be liable. IMO it's a very similar case to Zenefits except that Zenefits was just one company and not an entire industry.

I think it's more like car dealerships, and the banks are the people that make the cars (mortgages) which the dealerships (mortgage brokerages like countrywide + many many smaller operations) sell.

Being a mortgage broker is one step up from being a car salesman. Similar incentives, slightly more complicated, higher ticket, so they make more money. It is an extremely sales driven industry. "Sales driven" has meant different things throughout the decades, but it mainly means "get it sold" and/or "figure out how to get more money for a relatively undifferentiated product".

So here's my point: Someone sells me a piece of shit used car for $15,000 that they bought for $2,500 and turns out to have all kinds of problems with it. That car happens to be a Toyota. Am I going after Toyota?

Let's say this dealership is also the highest grossing toyota dealership in the tri-state area. Does that make a difference? Maybe I go after the dealership, but again, good luck; they didn't tell you there's nothing wrong with the car and the guy that did (good luck proving that) has moved on to another dealership, or maybe they're selling real estate now.

I'm not saying no crime was committed in the philisophical sense. I'm more saying that our practical implementation of crime and punishment is stretched by situations like this, and for good reason (which are the reasons I outline above). The answer to who is culpable, really, is everybody. So what?

No, these loans involved actual fraud. It's more like Toyota removed every form of safety testing from their manufacturing process and changed it to a 'wave at the foreman if this car has any defects' policy. The specific lies would be from factory workers who were told that they needed to produce x cars per day and that saying a car has a defect will get them fired, but the bigger lie is Toyota selling millions of cars knowing that they were labelling all of them as roadworthy but hadn't even attempted to verify that (and that it was literally impossible for the workers to have verified it when they had one guy testing the brakes on 500 cars per day). But that would probably actually be prosecuted because it's easy for people to understand 'Toyota lied about having verified their cars were safe!' and hard for people to understand 'Countrywide lied about having adequate underwriting practices to ensure that their loans were valid!'.