The system isn't broken

It's fixed

http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-execs-went-to-prison-during-the-last-fraud-fueled-bank-crisis/

Joshua Holland: To date, a few loan officers — small fish — have been convicted of various offenses related to the financial crash. But none of the big bankers have faced any charges. And it’s not that the government has been losing cases in the courts. There’s simply been no concerted effort to prosecute these guys. Can you contrast that with what happened during the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, and also give us your sense of why this has been the case?

William Black: Sure. The savings and loan debacle was one-seventieth the size of the current crisis, both in terms of losses and the amount of fraud. In that crisis, the savings and loan regulators made over 30,000 criminal referrals, and this produced over 1,000 felony convictions in cases designated as “major” by the Department of Justice. But even that understates the degree of prioritization, because we, the regulators, worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department to create a list of the top 100 — the 100 worst fraud schemes. They involved roughly 300 savings and loans and 600 individuals, and virtually all of those people were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate, which is the greatest success against elite white-collar crime (in terms of prosecution) in history.

In the current crisis, that same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate, among others, Countrywide, Washington Mutual and IndyMac — which collectively made hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mortgage loans — made zero criminal referrals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Reserve appears to have made zero criminal referrals; it made three about discrimination. And the FDIC was smart enough to refuse to answer the question, but nobody thinks they made any material number of criminal referrals [either].

It could episodically come from whistleblowers, but against an epidemic of fraud that can never work. It has to come overwhelmingly from the regulators. So when the regulators ceased making criminal referrals — which had nothing to do with an end of crime, obviously; it just had to do with a refusal to be involved in the prosecutorial effort anymore — they doomed us to a disaster where we would not succeed.

Rich man's justice and poor man's justice. When you have the people who make and enforce the law on the payroll there is really no law.

Like career advancement or a piece of the money they recover. I like that, CEO bounties.