Federal Government Policy and Business

The feds say they're finally going to go after bad guys on Wall Street

The Washington Post: Twenty-five years ago, lawyers for the George H.W. Bush administration were rounding up more bankers than you could fit in a whole fleet of stretch Hummers. The feds threw no fewer than 1,706 defendants in the slammer amid the savings-and-loan debacle between 1988 and 1992, and charged many more. The Justice Department was prosecuting "the major corporate insiders -- CEOs, presidents, shareholders, directors and officers," wrote Lee Rawls, an assistant attorney general under Bush, in response to a Government Accountability Office questioning whether even that was enough.

Whoever was right, this era's prosecutions of white-collar crime seems to pale in comparison. Just a handful of junior employees have been convicted in connection with the implosion of markets in mortgage-backed securities seven years ago.

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