Or rather, it's important to convince the public to remember that patent absurdity. The best part is that this kind of law "enforcement" ensures the banks need only wait a few years until everyone's forgotten this fiasco before they do it AGAIN. What negative consequences are there to deter them in the face of trillion dollar federal bailouts and investor money defrauded from some of the worlds foremost economies (which Iceland was until the subprime disaster brought them down)?

Everything about this is surreal; Americas most powerful law enforcement is acting to restore investor confidence in the nations largest lenders (instead of getting them out of the investment business in the first place like the erstwhile Glass-Steagall Act did). How? By negotiating a settlement to ensure investors those lenders defrauded have NO way to recover money stolen from them. How much crack would an investor have to be on to get within five miles of these institutionalized con artists now? That's a bigger threat to overseas investment in America, and thus the nations economy, than the federal deficit ever could be.

It's also the only thing that could ever queer the deal; millions of Americans unemployed and on the street are CLEARLY insufficient motive for any kind of legal consequences, let alone reform. The importance of Third World "stability" to investors was cited in a recent unrelated thread; it was noted that poverty, unemployment, starvation and disease must remain the norm in nations where rule of law is non-existent, bribing leaders is a primary cost of doing business and bands of desperate armed rebels are a constant threat to any government with which a foreign company makes a deal. If the second factor is accepted as the American norm, why does anyone think it won't normalize the first and third factors as well?

More simply, if Americas dishonest investor/lenders can defraud people on a scale that collapses the ENTIRE PLANETS economy and get away with it, why does anyone think 300 million Americans whose very lives are the playthings of these "institutions" won't demand accountability, even if that means removing government that stands in the way? Instead of giving perpetrators of the most destructive fraud in world history a get out of jail free card federal regulators and law enforcement need to demand that accountability for the sake of preserving American government. The dire alternative is a public consensus that a government which no longer exists in practice has no basis to exist in name. THAT consequence is serious enough that even the unthinkable (prosecuting fraud and grand larceny) is preferable. Not that it seems likely soon; the answer to Matt Taibbis question question "why isn't Wall Street in jail?" is "because it owns the cops".