A: None, because they are all wolves in sheeps' clothing. Bought, paid, and staffed by/of/for the bankers.
This FT article below is complete hogwash. Don't bother reading it. If you want the truth, don't read these minions.
The FT: Who went to jail for their role in the financial crisis?[2]
The FT identified 46 bankers jailed or under house arrest. Half were from just one country
Financial Times research has found, dispelling the myth that no one was held personally accountable for the financial sector’s catastrophic failures.
The FT searched records and news reports from across Europe and the US to uncover how many bank employees and directors were jailed for issues directly linked to the crisis or the collapse of their institutions.
Bah humbug… The FT must be scraping rubbish bins to accumulate statistics for their headlines?
Even in their appalling research dispelling the myth, you see only one in US, and none in UK. And that one person jailed in the US, was apparently not American or one of their own. They call him London. The sum total is Zero!
Iceland jailed the most bankers, i.e. about half. Can you see how/where democracy works?
Now read on for what some more proper journalists have to say…
The Economist: Why have so few bankers gone to jail?[3]
the world's financial system was brought to its knees and had to be bailed out by taxpayers at a cost of billions. Millions of people lost their jobs or suffered from lower living standards because of the recession brought on by the financial collapse. Yet almost no bankers have faced legal sanctions for their part in precipitating the crisis.
In Britain, which had to bail out three of its biggest banks, not one senior banker has gone on trial
In America there have been just a handful of criminal charges brought against senior executives of banks, and even fewer successful convictions. This is very different from the response of prosecutors in earlier banking crises…
German prosecutors have charged several bank executives whose banks failed, and in Brazil, bank directors can be held personally liable for the losses incurred by their banks. But the numbers involved are tiny.
Although the bosses may create or perpetuate a culture in which those lower down the ranks feel entitled or expected to abandon morality, there is seldom a chain of e-mails or other direct instructions
NY Times: Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis[4]
American financial history has generally unfolded as a series of booms followed by busts followed by crackdowns. After the crash of 1929, the Pecora Hearings seized upon public outrage, and the head of the New York Stock Exchange landed in prison. After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, 1100 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.
The credit crisis of 2008 dwarfed those busts, and it was only to be expected that a similar round of crackdowns would ensue.
But the crackdown never happened.
the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker — one who happened to be several rungs from the corporate suite at a second-tier financial institution.
the fact that the only top banker to go to jail for his role in the crisis was neither a mortgage executive (who created toxic products) nor the CEO of a bank (who peddled them) is something of a paradox, but it’s one that reflects the many paradoxes that got us here in the first place.
For years, big businesses, like tobacco companies, shielded questionable conduct by invoking attorney-client privilege, which could render details of troubling executive dealings inadmissible in court. If a company came under federal scrutiny, it typically paid its executives' legal bills, hiring some of the nation’s best firms, those who could slow or derail any inquiries. And when multiple executives fell under suspicion, their lawyers would often sign joint defense agreements allowing them to share with one another what they learned
When Wall Street bankers are arrested, they often do what is known in finance as an expected-value analysis: They weigh the cost of fighting, how long it would take and the chances of the best and worst outcomes.
After ignoring the risks of the housing and credit bubbles, they took the high-risk-high-reward gamble again, hiring top lawyers and claiming that they never intended to deceive. As it turned out, they benefited from a decade of subtle changes that favored corporate executives under investigation.
Federal prosecutors almost never bring criminal charges against top executives of large corporations, from banking to pharmaceuticals to technology.
As the economy limps back from the Great Recession, compensation has recovered, corporate profits are at record levels and executives see that few, if any, of their peers ever go to prison anymore.
"I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." Eric Holder, US Attorney General.
The Atlantic: How Wall Street's Bankers Stayed Out of Jail[5]
The probes into bank fraud leading up to the financial industry’s crash have been quietly closed. Is this justice?
How we arrived at a place where Wall Street misdeeds go virtually unpunished while soccer executives in Switzerland get arrested is murky at best.
Since 2009… financial institutions have paid… nearly $190b in fines and settlements
That may seem like a big number, but the money has come from shareholders, not individual bankers. (Settlements were levied on corporations, not specific employees, and paid out as corporate expenses — in some cases, tax-deductible ones.)
In early 2014, just weeks after Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, settled out of court with the Justice Department, the bank's board of directors gave him a 74% raise.
The more meaningful number is how many Wall Street executives have gone to jail for playing a part in the crisis. That number is one. Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse, is serving a 30-month sentence for inflating the value of mortgage bonds
Wall Street bankers make it their daily business to figure out ways to abide by the letter of the law while violating its spirit.
The Justice Department's ethos regarding Wall Street, and the way the department went about its business, appear to be a large part of the story.
Any narrative of how we got to this point has to start with the so-called Holder Doctrine… warning of the dangers of prosecuting big banks — a variant of the "too big to fail" argument that has since become so familiar.
extracting large settlements paid with shareholders' money is not the same as bringing alleged wrongdoers to justice.
Justice Department… playbook: Threaten public disclosure of behavior that looks criminal and then, in exchange for keeping it sealed, extract a huge financial settlement. No one individual, or group of individuals, is held accountable. No predawn raids of Park Avenue apartments are made. No one gets arrested. No one gets publicly shamed.
Holder, meanwhile, along with his old colleague Lanny Breuer, has returned to the white-shoe law firm… that he left in order to join the Justice Department — Covington & Burling, which counts among its clients Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. (The firm reportedly kept his office for him.)
without holding real people on Wall Street accountable for their wrongdoing in the years leading up to the financial crisis, the message that their behavior was unacceptable goes undelivered. Instead a very different message is being sent:
for financiers, justice is just a check someone else has to write.
[1] Financial crisis: Are we safer now?
[2] Who went to jail for their role in the financial crisis?
[3] Why have so few bankers gone to jail?
[4] Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis
[5] How Wall Street's Bankers Stayed Out of Jail
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