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Comment by aioprisan | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that there's been clear industrial fraud on this scale before and a company survived this? Care to cite some examples?

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GM's deliberate cover up of of faulty ignition modules which resulted in dozens of deaths. (The mistake wasn't deliberate, but the systematic sweeping under the rug and ignoring the known issue definitely was)

That and banks get away with worse all the time, even ignoring 2008 which is hard to pin on a single actor. You have LIBOR scandals, HSBC violating sanctions with Iran - clear deliberate legal violations that result in fines and maybe some new regs but that's it. If you extend the criteria into gross negligence there are tons of horrible examples - BP spilling a gazillion barrels of crude into the gulf. Executives are forced to pull the golden ripcord a little early. The companies keep ticking.

2008 financial crisis - collateralized debt obligations. Incomparably bigger.

That's overly simplistic. CDOs aren't inherently bad by themselves, and there are multiple types with a variety of underlying assets. It was the failure of the rating agencies to assess risk appropriately that made it into a crisis. There's been no proof of collusion among the banks to create a crisis, no specific people that criminal charges could be brought against, unlike in the case of VW.

By saying CDOs I meant their ratings. And while, as always, nothing can be proven on Wall Street, you won't tell me that giving mortgages to unemployed people and then selling it as CDOs (or even CDOs squared!) is good.

I made no claims to good or bad, of course the crash wasn't good, but the chain of proof isn't there for the financial crisis in the same way. I'm simply talking about provable fraud that needed to take place up the chain at VW, which, when you're talking about an engineered machine with clear trails of who's done what and multiple decision points over iterations of industrial components, it's much easier to follow to the source and prosecute accordingly.

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