You can delegate authority, not responsibility.
This fundamental rule of hierarchical organizations is why CEO's need to be held accountable. CEO's are responsible for creating the environment, culture and rules that allow such activities to take place. Failure within an organization on a CEO's watch is that CEO's fault. That's why CEO's deserve high compensation - because the difficulty and risk are so high. If there's no CEO penalty for failing (or worse, breaking the law), than all companies in society suffer.
My entire argument was that someone somewhere along the chain was indeed responsible and it doesnt have to be the CEO. Youre arguing that the CEO cannot be completely responsible, which totally sidesteps the 14 other layers of people responsible and also conveniently ignores the other 14 layers that could be held responsible, investigated, and prosecuted.
Fine, the CEO cant be responsible -- is absolutely no one responsible at all within the organization? If so, how did tens of billions of dollars of profits pour in? How can no one be responsible and yet the companies be so profitable?
Probably has something to do with the upper-crust NY culture where those at the SEC, NY Times, SD-DoJ, and Walls Street are all friends. It is also not surprising that the two individuals on whom most issues were hung were a French trader with a deep french accent and an Egyption desk head at a Swiss bank.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/01/gol...
... like Kareem Serageldin. Who went to prison.
He was literally the ONLY single person who did.
At the same time, convicting a low level work in his 20s as the ring leader (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/01/fabulous-fa...) is disingenuous.