Had bankers broken regulations with “reckless abandon”, a few more of them might be in jail. And there’s the problem: a lot of the shenanigans might not have been on the up-and-up, but they were not illegal. For example, Moodys rating junk derivatives as AAA isn’t illegal, AFAIK, it’s a trust issue that should have put Moody’s out of business but didn’t.

I'm not sure 2008 was a problem of information transparency. There were people who accurately read the signs and viewed the documentation.

The crash was the result of speculation and improper risk assessment, followed by the inevitable correction.

to say that 2008 happened as proof that these regulations don't work is kind of erroneous, as many of the regulations were revised or implemented as a result of that crash, to avoid it happening again.

2008 was about over leverage and speculation.

It was also about mortgage fraud ... bond rating fraud ... multinational banks selling fraudulent mortgage backed securities based on the previous two frauds. Almost no one went to jail for any of it, the few who did were little fish. The SEC, Fed, Treasury and DOJ were asleep at the wheel before and during the crash and did almost nothing after other than reward the perpetrators: A. threw $700 billion in tax payer funds at them B. forced mergers that made some of them even bigger C. the Fed printed $4 trillion dollars and handed it to them to plow in to the stock market and juiced an 8 year bull market which enriched all of them.

Cryptocurrencies certainly have their problems but the last 10 years have been a case study in how horrible fiat currencies and the current global financial system really is. Japan's central bank has printed so much money they own something like 65% of all the ETF's on the Nikkei.

China, EU, U.S. and Japan have printed something like $16 trillion dollars since the crash. If banks leverage that at a conservative 12X that's $192 trillion. The world is awash in fantasy money.

It is easy to claim that these things were fraud, but courts have not agreed that they were fraud. The dispersion of responsibility in the system made it difficult for any one person to be solely responsible for the actions of the firm. the "fraud" you perceive was an emergent phenomenon resulting from poor oversight. Few people actually committed fraud. The difference in personal responsibility is very important, especially for the people involved.

I agree, however, that our legal system lacks an adequate punishment for companies that allow such poor governance practices. I don't feel it is necessary to throw people in jail for it, though.

In my opinion, we ought to be able to convict a company of "governance failure" which would carry the concomitant punishment of mandatorily ejecting all officers and directors without severance and without the ability to exercise options.

No... large numbers of people committed fraud. Countrywide, and one of its execs, were convicted of fraud in one of the egregious examples of "the hustle". The problem was an appeals court overturned the conviction in an inexplicable decision:

https://www.propublica.org/article/us-attorney-asks-court-to...