Reports that Credit Suisse (CS) and BNP Paribas (BNPQY) may be hit with criminal charges
stunned Wall Street Wednesday as it potentially marks a dramatic shift
in how Federal prosecutors look at the financial services industry.
Since the 2008 crisis and up to and including JPMorgan's (JPM)
settlement for enabling Bernie Madoff earlier this year, U.S.
regulators have typically sought to settle cases of alleged misdeeds
rather than pursue criminal charges. Typically, the big banks pay a fine
without having to admit to any wrongdoing and no senior executives have
suffered anything more than, perhaps, deferred bonuses.
In his latest book, The Divide,
Matt Taibbi set out to examine why Wall Street has been largely immune
from prosecution since the 2008 crisis; that's in contrast to the
S&L crisis of the 1980s -- when over 800 bankers went to jail -- and
the accounting scandals of the early 2000s, when high profile CEOs like
Enron's Jeffrey Skilling, WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers, Tyco's Dennis
Kozlowski and Adelphia's John Rigas went to jail for various crimes.
"After 2008 - certainly there
were no less ethical misdeeds -- but we've seen nothing, not even
symbolic prosecutions," Taibbi says. "It's qualitatively different."
Read more: American justice is blind, but likes the sound of money: Matt Taibbi | Daily Ticker - Yahoo Finance
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