Wall Street Fines For 2008 Malfeasance - $40 Billion And Counting

Click here for an article by Matthew Goldstein in The New York Times entitled "Goldman to Pay Up to $5 Billion to Settle Claims of Faulty Mortgages."

The Wall Street firm [Goldman Sachs] said on Thursday it had agreed to a civil settlement of up to $5 billion with federal prosecutors and regulators to resolve claims stemming from the marketing and selling of faulty mortgage securities to investors.

But Goldman wasn't the biggest offender:

Bank of America in 2014 paid about $16.6 billion in a similar settlement with federal and state agencies, and JPMorgan Chase paid about $13 billion in 2013. In all, the banks have paid more than $40 billion in settlements to resolve claims investigated by the task force.

Why not criminal charges? A lot of people went to prison as a result of recent financial scandals. According to another New York Times article, by Jesse Eisinger, on April 20, 2014, states:

After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. In the ’90s and early aughts, when the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble revealed widespread corporate accounting scandals, top executives from WorldCom, Enron, Qwest and Tyco, among others, went to prison.

According to Charlie Pierce at Esquire, SPW (Senator Professor Warren) says the following:

"There's been a lot of revisionist history floating around lately that the Too Big to Fail banks weren't really responsible for the financial crisis. That talk isn't new. Wall Street lobbyists have tried to deflect blame for years. But the claim is absolutely untrue. There would have been no crisis without these giant banks. They encouraged reckless mortgage lending both by gobbling up an endless stream of mortgages to securitize and by funding the slimy subprime lenders who peddled their miserable products to millions of American families," Warren wrote. "The giant banks spread that risk throughout the financial system by misleading investors about the quality of the mortgages in the securities they were offering."