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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

This is an important point, and one that I personally believe explains why we didn't see prosecutions at the highest level. Geithner was instrumental in guiding Obama away from this heavy handed approach, as he recognized (I think quite accurately) that confidence was really the only thing keeping the system from crashing completely.

If Obama had given execs the kind of treatment Larry Summers and the other half of his team wanted (heads on sticks to put it lightly) it would have rocked the investment world and brought much more pain to our economy than many could bear. The American people would have seen justice, but most likely at a substantial cost to the American way of life with ripple (tsunami?) effects seen and felt around the world.

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Understand that what Presidents say in public is very different from what they do in private.

Why anyone would expect Obama to carry through such threats when his staff has mostly been from these very same groups is beyond me. If anything its more like, you guys are going on pikes unless you play ball, here let me connect you to my campaign finance coordinator. Geitner protected his buddies. The real collapse would have been the money available to the various campaigns that eat it up directly or indirectly.

Washington is the one percent, they own Wall Street more than Wall Street owns them. They excuse themselves from insider trading, tax issues, and the like. How are the executives at Fannie and Freddie any different from those at other lending groups? Simple, they have/had better political connections.

FYI, Geithner has never been employed by anything vaguely resembling a private bank. He was a consultant for 3 years after school, before joining government.

Geithner was instrumental in guiding Obama away from this heavy handed approach, as he recognized (I think quite accurately) that confidence was really the only thing keeping the system from crashing completely.

Which means that system deserved to crash, die, burn to ashes, and leave us clean ground on which to rebuild.

Thought I appreciate the sentiment "just do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may" and try to live my life according to it, on a scale of countries and when hundreds of million of people lives would be affected, it's simply irresponsible and stupid.

You misunderstand. I don't mean, "do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may"; I'm not talking about deontological ethics.

I'm talking about the fact that the system does not work. It was and is ruining people's lives, and all the bail-outs (which have become systemic) did is prop it up for its few "winners" at the expense of everyone else. Economically speaking, the West is being transformed into Japan: a zombie economy run for zombie banks through zombie companies by ever-more-impoverished workers and propped up at the taxpayers' expense.

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