Securitization Excuse Confabulator

We live in a nation where financial crimes are not punished enough to deter them in the slightest:

So to recap: a unit of Citigroup, having repeatedly violated the same laws and having repeatedly violated the SEC’s own cease-and-desist orders and injunctions, is dragged into court one more time for committing a massive fraud.

And what does the SEC do? It doesn’t even bring up Citi’s history of ignoring the SEC’s own order, slaps the bank with a fractional fine, refuses to target any individuals, allows the bank to walk away without an admission of wrongdoing, and puts a cherry on the top by describing the $160 million heist not as a crime, but as unintentional negligence.

And it's not as though Citigroup is the only home of thoroughly institutionalized fraud. All of its competing syndicates do it too:

According to a New York Times analysis, nearly all of the biggest financial companies — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America among them — have settled fraud cases by promising that they would never again violate an antifraud law, only to have the S.E.C. conclude they did it again a few years later.

Time to turn this over to the Organized Crime Task Force and pursue a few juicy RICO cases.

(h/t John Cole at Balloon Juice)