Why is lloyd blankfein not in jail

As you read the news on your phone, you feel that your gleaming bald pate—the one that would have made you a perfect candidate for the job of Goldman C. And worse, everyone knows. A former Goldman Sachs partner agreed: this was no coincidence. For his part, Lloyd suggested on Twitter that rumors of his impending departure were greatly exaggerated:. View on Twitter. If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

The seven-year sentence—to which Shkreli listened impassively—was significantly higher than the month maximum requested by defense lawyers. Shkreli's sentencing was not connected to that pricing of the anti-parasite medication, Daraprim. Are we doing OK? Why the new tax law caused a 'perfect storm' for Roth IRA conversions. Advanced Search Submit entry for keyword results. They wondered what prison inmates would think.

Eventually, this idea distilled itself into Captured: people in prison drawing people who should be. Finding prison artists to contribute to Captured turned out to be surprisingly tricky, though. At first, Tider and Greenspan approached prison wardens and individuals who ran prison art programs.

However, its unsavory dealmaking should not obscure that in betting, correctly, against the housing market, it helped mitigate the crash. Had more firms done as Goldman and shorted mortgages, fewer unsound loans would have been issued. Converse to the Goldman example of punishing profits, there is an assumption that heads of failed Wall Street banks should stand trial for their failures. But imprisonment is a punishment for criminality—not a sociological remedy for unfairness, incompetence, or outsize losses.

The demands for jail sentences are buttressed by the populist notion that Wall Street is basically a Ponzi scheme. Although he claimed to be investing in postal reply coupons—buying discounted international postage and redeeming it for face value in the U. Madoff was his carbon copy.

But was all of Wall Street a copy, too? Ferguson says yes. Recently the director slammed author Diana B. Henriques The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust for failing to see, as Ferguson does, that Madoff shed "a ghoulishly revealing light … on what was contemporaneously happening to America's financial system and government. Mortgage securities had an element of Ponzi in that new financing was required to sustain people whose mortgages were under water.

However, many companies would grind to a halt without refinancing. The reason they don't is that most have genuine income. This was also true of mortgage securities. The system of issuing bonds backed by mortgage payments had endured, with few hiccups, for 30 years. Mortgages were not postal reply coupons. They became, of course, hugely overextended. It is a truism that Wall Street takes a good idea to extreme, whence springs trouble. Even so, being negligent and even reckless with a viable business is not the same as cooking up a scheme in which revenue never existed.

Bubbly markets inevitably attract con men, but not every episode of wrongdoing warrants high-level prosecution. On May 3, the Justice Dept. The case involves 39, loans, whose quality the Deutsche unit was required to monitor. Some 12, of the loans defaulted. According to the suit, Deutsche taking advantage of the government insurance didn't even bother to read reports detailing the loans' poor quality.

The bank even reassigned the staff member dedicated to auditing the mortgages to producing more mortgages! Deutsche has denied the charges. The Justice Dept.

It is worth noting that the U. In deciding whether to bring a criminal case at Deutsche, Justice had to answer whether senior executives had intimate participation in the bad behavior.

The question was complicated by the fact that Deutsche acquired the lending subsidiary only in January —when, according to the Frankfurt-based investment bank, 90 percent of the loans had already been issued.

If Justice did decide that higher-ups were implicated, it had to resolve whether they merely failed to monitor loan quality or actively conspired to defraud. The latter is harder to prove and presumably less frequent. In a civil action, a verdict may be based on the preponderance of evidence. A criminal case requires a stronger narrative—and a willful protagonist.