Comment by 59percentmore
18 hours ago
That's the wrong question. The right question is, "What crimes can be construed to have been committed, in order to put enough people in jail for long enough sentences such that the chain of malicious and destructive financial misconduct which lead to the crisis can be severed?".
We put Capone away on tax evasion. Get creative.
Maybe I’m the only person who thinks this, but I think your line of thinking is very dangerous and way more dangerous than ANT or SPCX.
Is it? How so?
And tell that to the people whose retirement index funds are about to drop xx% in order to facilitate an exit for ANT and SPCX insiders.
Capone actually did evade taxes, though. Nobody "construed [it] to have been committed." It was a real crime.
If you think something is bad for society but it's not legal, you make it illegal. You don't make up false crimes and arrest people for those. That's what tyrants and sociopaths do. It's disgusting.
No one said anything about making up crimes. The point is to look at a financial crisis or catastrophic market event with the mindset that functional markets where everyone is playing fair do not behave that way, and that, because the situation is abnormal, a crime is likely to have been committed to set it in those circumstances.
Further, because the complexity and opacity of markets and firms makes finding and proving specific securities fraud instances difficult and expensive, makes pinning those instances on the actual decision-makers difficult and expensive, and makes securing consequences that actually stop the fraud functionally or as a deterrent difficult and expensive, it is prudent and pragmatic to identify those decision-makers and to go after them for anything and everything you can find. If you're a high-powered banker and hedge fund manager who uses sophisticated strategies to fleece millions of Americans out of their investments, you shouldn't get off because investigators can't get at the smoking gun documents that you burned or hid from discovery. I want them to ignore the small-fry and go after you with everything they've got.
We did not do this after 2008, which is why we are where we are.
So again, the correct question is not a skeptical, "What crime has been committed?", but a willful," What crimes can we find among the people involved here, whatever they are?". I have no moral qualms or compunction about this, and no one who remembers the ravages of the GFC or the last few years will have an issue, either.