<story><title>Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)</title><url>https://features.marketplace.org/why-no-ceo-went-jail-after-financial-crisis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>In many other jobs, gross negligence resulting in billions of dollars of property damage can get you jail time. Why is it ok for the people at the top of these financial disasters to be immune? Whether they&amp;#x27;re deceiving themselves is irrelevant. Drunk drivers deceive themselves about their ability to drive safely, we still put them in jail.</text></item><item><author>nickff</author><text>These stories all seem to ride on similar popular sentiments: &amp;#x27;bad things happened, and rich people were involved, so they should go to jail&amp;#x27;. Having read a few of the books cited at the bottom, I have been repeatedly surprised at how these financial disasters came to be; it often seems like the people at the top were deceiving themselves more than anyone else. Bethany McLean&amp;#x27;s other book, &amp;quot;The Smartest Guys in the Room&amp;quot; (relevant but not cited here) was a particularly good example of this, and I came away from it with a very different view of Enron than I&amp;#x27;d had going in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickff</author><text>In many of these instances, it seems more like multiple layers of ‘rose-colored glasses’, than one person being willfully ignorant. This is somewhat similar to engineering situations where each reviewer adds some safety margin, and the end product becomes bloated.&lt;p&gt;Enron is a particularly interesting case, because the filings and statements were all truthful, but almost nobody ever read them. They also had one or two good businesses, but were dragged down by liabilities from the others, so it wasn’t a total fraud. That said, I do think the Enron CFO was guilty of criminal fraud, though I think Lay and Skilling should have only been held civilly liable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)</title><url>https://features.marketplace.org/why-no-ceo-went-jail-after-financial-crisis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>In many other jobs, gross negligence resulting in billions of dollars of property damage can get you jail time. Why is it ok for the people at the top of these financial disasters to be immune? Whether they&amp;#x27;re deceiving themselves is irrelevant. Drunk drivers deceive themselves about their ability to drive safely, we still put them in jail.</text></item><item><author>nickff</author><text>These stories all seem to ride on similar popular sentiments: &amp;#x27;bad things happened, and rich people were involved, so they should go to jail&amp;#x27;. Having read a few of the books cited at the bottom, I have been repeatedly surprised at how these financial disasters came to be; it often seems like the people at the top were deceiving themselves more than anyone else. Bethany McLean&amp;#x27;s other book, &amp;quot;The Smartest Guys in the Room&amp;quot; (relevant but not cited here) was a particularly good example of this, and I came away from it with a very different view of Enron than I&amp;#x27;d had going in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>What if someone grossly negligently screws up a $1000 smart contract that convinces the public that bitcoin sucks and the value plummets? It&amp;#x27;s gross negligence resulting in billions of dollars of losses for others. Are you going to call that property damage in the same way?</text></comment>