I also love it when some people are just "Too Big To Jail (TM)"

> Those investigations uncovered substantial evidence "that senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity."

> On Tuesday, not only did the US Justice Department announce that HSBC would not be criminally prosecuted, but outright claimed that the reason is that they are too important, too instrumental to subject them to such disruptions. In other words, shielding them from the system of criminal sanction to which the rest of us are subject is not for their good, but for our common good.

> The New York Times Editors this morning announced: "It is a dark day for the rule of law." There is, said the NYT editors, "no doubt that the wrongdoing at HSBC was serious and pervasive." But the bank is simply too big, too powerful, too important to prosecute.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/12/hsbc-p...

You've as a country determined that an institution is too important to your population and your country's stability to have it go bankrupt. But instead of growing your economy through it, you through actions deem it okay to siphon money to the private owners instead of the people paying for it through taxes.

The existing common equity (and IIRC preferred stock) in a number of entities was massively diluted by issuing new preferred stock and warrants to the US government.

Here are two examples, they were among the worst offenders. Look at the share price for Citigroup and AIG:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/C?p=C https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/aig/?p=aig

If you owned pre-crisis C common stock, you're still down about 84%. If you owned pre-crisis AIG common, you're still down about 95%. (that's approximate, done by eyeballing the charts). Edit: Yahoo Finance charts have been getting worse and worse, you need to click "Max" to see the proper timeline.

I don't follow UK equities closely, but I think the same thing happened to a number of UK banks at the time. E.g. RBS.

Unfortunately the whole thing was quite uneven. E.g. Goldman Sachs took advantage of the morons at AIG who sold them very cheap "insurance" such as credit default swaps. But Goldman was made whole. What should have happened is that Goldman should have been made to share the pain.

Edit: I'm of course talking about the '08 financial crisis in general. I don't agree that the Libor scandal was significant enough to nationalize the banks as punishment. I'd much rather see a few bad actors taken out back and shot. That would be much more salutary in terms of deferring future bad behavior.

They should have just let the market work and the banks go under.

It would have been a financial loss but a moral victory. An important lesson about carefully choosing who you trust.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/09/07/nicky-morgan-...

If they have questionable ethics, so will the industries they run.

The real problem isn't banking, it's neoliberalism's sanctification of individualistic greed. When collective morality decides that almost any behaviour is acceptable as long as a few people make a big profit, the political and moral consequences are unlikely to be positive.

The paragraph before:

> … One of the things I found interesting researching this book is that there are a lot of people out there, experts in law enforcement and criminal justice, who really think that the situation we’re now in is a direct result of a lack of ambition and creativity and guts among prosecutors in some of the biggest countries in the world, including the U.S. The thing is, prosecutors do not like to lose cases, so they’ve taken, in general, a very conservative approach to what cases they’re going to bring because they don’t want to gamble on losing. They’ve built up these very impressive win/loss records as prosecutors. Some of them are undefeated. And they boast about that.

They went after low-level guys because the big fish have better connections and better lawyers and much riskier in terms of publicity if you lose your case.

That sounds like the opposite of the "rule of law", to me at least.

You can argue for more or less false positives at the expense of false negatives. But saying they should prosecute, not because they're likely to win, but because it'll act as a deterrent, seems wrong. For one, having lots of cases that get thrown out also hurts public trust. For another, losing cases reduces incentives to settle.

Making all prosecutors more likely to bring charges in cases they think they will lose sounds like a bad idea. The easy scary example is of prosecutors frequently bringing simple theft charges against people who just happened to be nearby a theft. It's obviously bad: huge numbers of potentially powerless, innocent people are exposed to extreme damage to their character, which they cannot fix and which may destroy their lives and health. The false positive dominates the situation, and its harm to society is clear.

In the specific case of top-level bank executives manipulating things like LIBOR, I think the balance just as clearly tips the other way. Consider the rarity of the crime, the impact of the crime, the size of the impacted group who may have charges brought against them (right or wrong), and the power of members of that group within society.

I posit that the crime is exceedingly rare (we're discussing a probable instance from over a decade ago), the impact of the crime is exceedingly high (by harming the entire financial apparatus of society, it can meaningfully cause real harm to millions, if not billions of people), the size of the group is exceedingly small (you could legibly write all of the potentially impacted people's names over decades on a small stack of A4 paper), and the power within society of members of the group is uniformly among the highest possible level in our society (they are by definition some of the richest and most well connected into the political, financial, and legal systems of the world).

Balance toward the false negative here implies that members of this class of potential perpetrator could feel more they are likely to get away with this specific crime. Balance toward the false positive implies that, when this massive crime is believed to have been committed, these few, powerful members are open to, let's say high chance of wrongful arrest, that they have the overwhelming ability to remedy the effects of via legal means after the fact.

The potential for meaningful harm to society seems to be decidedly on the side of allowing false negatives. In this specific, unbelievably narrow context, I am all for shifting the balance toward more prosecutions. I think that this is in line with the argument being put forward originally by the parent.

The article advocates prosecutors charging bankers even though they “might have lost those cases, but at least it would have struck some fear in the hearts of people.” If you lose the case, there was no crime. Charging people with unwinnable cases is bad.

OP is saying Enrich (the guy being interviewed) went too far when saying about cases that would be lost: “but at least it would have struck some fear in the hearts of people.” I agree with the point about prosecutorial conservatism. But part of the conservatism is a product of proper restraint. Drug crime prosecutors show the opposite end of the spectrum; our criminal justice system aspires to a default of innocence for a reason.

your interpretation = "we wouldn't have won but we would have scared them"

my interpretation "we may not have won every case but the very fact that cases were prosecuted would have been valuable"