New rules at DoJ for prosecuting white-collar crime

Why didn't the Justice Department charge any individuals in the financial meltdown and housing crisis of 2008?  That question has been hanging around for years now, and it's pretty clear that it's not going to be answered directly.

But here's a pretty good indirect answer.   The Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has written a memo that outlines the future rules for federal prosecutors, which she announced in a speech on Thursday at the NYU Law School.

Reuter's news service reported that Yates' memo said:

"Crime is crime . . . And it is our obligation at the Justice Department to ensure that we are holding lawbreakers accountable regardless of whether they commit their crimes on the street corner or in the board room.   In the white-collar context, that means pursuing not just corporate entities but also the individuals through which these corporations act."

She said the Justice Department wanted to "change corporate culture to appropriately recognize the full costs of wrongdoing, rather than treating liability as a cost of doing business."  And she outlined some steps that will be implemented -- apparently in the future, rather than retroactively -- that spell out how this will be carried out.

What this suggests is that this was not the policy but will be in the future.   Does this really mean that the DoJ under past AGs could not go after CEO's and other corporate officials?   Or just that it wasn't the tradition, as a sort of  'go easy on Wall Street' philosophy?

At least it's good to know that in the future individuals will be held accountable.   As an individual whose private retirement fund has not yet recovered from the crash of 2008, I deeply resent that we on Main Street suffered -- and the bank CEO's and hedge fund managers just got insanely richer.  And not a one of them was held accountable.

Ralph