The lesson here, and from pretty much any page of any history book you care to flip to, is that sooner or later there's a bill that comes due for advancing the worst people to the highest posts.

If you're not important to someone powerful, lying, cheating, stealing, and generally doing harm for personal profit will bring you to an unpleasant end right quick.

But the longer you can keep the con going, the bigger the bill: its an unserviceable debt. So Skilling and Meriwether were able to bring down whole companies, close offices across entire cities.

This is by no means the worst case though, because if your institutions fail to kick in? There's no ceiling, its like being short a stock in a squeeze.

You keep it going long enough, its your country, or your entire civilization.

You want the institutions to kick in before that.