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Comment by ffgjgf1 | Hacker News Reader

> These kinds of things are deals negotiated at the highest level of the companies involved

To me it just seems a more or less natural outcome of the major structural flaws in the whole business model. I’m not sure you need an explicit conspiracy for credit agencies to begin behaving in such a way that maximizes their revenue, it was mostly just a natural outcome of competition and extremely useless and inefficient regulation. If anyone deserves to go to prison it’s the people who were supposed to be regulating the banking industry.

Obviously the Federal government had zero interest in doing that but if they only went after the bankers it would have quickly become obvious that they are not the only ones to blame.

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“You don’t need an explicit conspiracy for pig butchering. It’s a natural outcome of competition in the black market and extremely poor security and training.”

If you can actually draw a distinction between what scammers do and what companies do other than “we explicitly have laws on the books to treat it as a crime” I’d love to hear it. There’s a lot of similarities between corporations and criminal organizational - it’s just groups of people who are trying to make money.

And as for who deserves to go to prison, the ratings agencies refused to pay market rates to retain talent being poached by the banks. The same happens in government. So basically the banks continually poach the best people and create incentives to keep the status quo and for regulators to turn a blind eye so that they can land at the bank later. You can go after the regulators but I don’t think that’s going to be an effective strategy to solve the problem.

> You don’t need an explicit conspiracy for pig butchering

Yeah but IMO the scam part is mostly tangential. It hardly matters what did the CEO do with the stolen money, he could have gambled it away at a casino or bought a yacht with it, at the end of the day he still stole it and that’s the crime we’re discussing here.

> You can go after the regulators but I don’t think that’s going to be an effective strategy to solve the problem.

Yes, but going after the bankers would have exposed the extreme incompetence by the regulators and if you started unwinding the whole thing it would have affected a lot of high level people in government. So it’s rather obvious that that they had very little desire to prosecute anyone.

And it hardly matters who deserves what since you can’t send anyone who was just exploiting loopholes and didn’t clearly brake any laws regardless how immoral or unethical their actions were.

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