It speaks to how outrageous the fraud he committed was. It is a very high bar one must clear.

If anyone attempts to whistleblow on the fraud that the banks have allowed for years as shown in the FinCEN files, then you will find yourself in a prison cell for exposing it. [0]

[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/fincen-file...

She whistleblew on the regulators to the media.

That is even worse that the regulators knew about the fraud that the banks have allowed and by someone reporting about it can land them in a prison cell.

> even worse that the regulators knew about the fraud

What fraud do you think they were covering up?

SARs are filed when money laundering is suspected. To the extent something was being covered up, it was money laundering. Not fraud.

> What fraud do you think they were covering up?

The fact that banks such as HSBC failed to flag and stop transactions to a ponzi scheme that they knew about with their 'AML' systems and processed it anyway. [0] This would never have been known before the leak and even worse that the regulators did nothing until the leak.

> SARs are filed when money laundering is suspected. To the extent something was being covered up, it was money laundering. Not fraud.

So not only just fraud that was covered up but money laundering and processing payments for mobsters and drug cartels which the banks allowed and failed to stop it.

This is getting even worse than imagined.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54225572

Can you be more specific about those responsible?

Jamie Dimon should be in prison right now, for one.

Half of the big bank CEOS, and major wall street players should be in jail... they just have more money then Sam Bankman-Fried had, because he lost it all. If he had substantial resources outside FTC, do you think he would be in jail?

> If he had substantial resources outside FTC, do you think he would be in jail?

Yes. The brazenness of his fraud would land the most powerful Wall Street tycoon in jail.

In case the rose tint is coming on, this was his balance sheet [1][2].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/f05fe9f8-ca0a-48d5-8ef2-7a4d813af...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-14/ftx-s-...

Fair! His major issue was certainly not hiding it very well, if he hid it better that would have helped.

> major issue was certainly not hiding it very well, if he hid it better that would have helped

His major issue was stealing the money. Wall Street has no shortage of high fuckery, but frequency of outright embezzlement is fairly low. Not because the people are better. But because regulations make it hard to hide.

No, that wasn't it. As Matt Levine put it, if you have $16 billion in liabilities, and you have $16 billion in T-bonds, you're in a good situation. If it's instead $16 billion in Bitcoin, well, you're a crypto bank, so it's probably fit for your purpose. If it's $16 billion in shitcoins, your risk judgement is questionable.

But FTX was none of those, it was $16 billion in assets FTX made up--it cost FTX $0 to acquire those assets and the valuation was arbitrarily inflatable to $16 billion. So the $16 billion in dollars that FTX acquired that caused it to accrue $16 billion in liabilities went... somewhere in return for $0. That's fundamentally stealing.

In the global financial crisis, the banks largely committed the sins in the first paragraph: they had bad risk management, and fundamentally underestimated risk in certain markets. To a large degree, they didn't even hide their risks at all (indeed, a large part of the cascading nature of the crisis was everyone piecing together who was now most in trouble). What FTX did was something completely different, just pissing away the money while pretending it was still in a vault, and hoping nobody would open the vault to find nothing was in there.

The problem is proving the culpability of a particular individual, because it is the organizational structure that drives criminal acts. That's why big organizations have lawyers on their payrolls in order to provide policies to shield individuals. The only way to get around that is to use RICO. I don't think any US attorney wants to use RICO against any big business in the states, thanks to the revolving door.

> Jamie Dimon should be in prison right now

Dimon? Why?

Of all of big bank CEOs at the time, this is probably the least arguable case of a CEO that should have been sent to prison. JP Morgan was taking less relative risks than any of the other big banks at the time. It was the only big bank that largely avoided a major credit crunch during the crisis, as they got out of subprime in 2006, before the credit crisis hit. It was also the only bank out of the nine largest in the US at the time that didn't need TARP funds, which allowed them to use the TARP funds that they did receive to buy other banks and businesses.

Are you trolling? You think it happened by accident?

Get them too

Came here to say exactly this. That financial crisis ruined countless lives. The dominos fell all around the world. Across the Atlantic in Ireland I knew of several suicides. Most of my friends were at the age where they had paired off, and got onto the property ladder with tiny, overpriced "starter homes". Why? For one, to get out of the rent trap. But mainly because they wanted to start a family. Most of my college buddies ended up sentenced to 15+ years of negative equity. People blamed them for making unsound investments, but they had already delayed having kids well into their late 30s, and had no choice. I know families with several teenage kids who never recovered financially. The big banks repackaged bullshit subprime mortgages into CDOs that the ratings agencies gave AAA+ ratings to.

Frankly, I think that the perpetrators didn't go to jail for the same reason that a huge number of Nazis avoided consequences after WWII: there were simply too many people complicit in it, but no chief architect. There was a simple choice: prosecute them all and lose the whole banking sector, or bail them out. So the government decided that the taxpayer would bail them out. The same tax players who lost homes and livelihoods. And they weren't just bailed out financially, the slate was scrubbed clean.

What Bankman Fried did was nothing in comparison. I believe should go to jail, but 50 years? That's probably more than first degree murder in most states.

I agree, everyone involved in that should've suffered the same consequences, or worse, but the next best time to start handing out real punishment is right now.