[appleflaxen]

Where were these zealous prosecutors during the global financial meltdown in 2008? It would be nice if people went to jail for fraudelently representing mortgages.

I'm fine with Gox getting investigated, too, but justice shouldn't depend on who you are.

[rodgerd]

They were cheerfully going after targets, until it turned out that the public are easy to convince that effective prosecuters should lose their jobs if they visit sex workers.

The fact the current top comment in this thread is someone slagging off a prosecuter for going after insder traders demonstrates that HN's as dumb an audience as the average tabloid reader when it comes to convincing people that enforcing the law against corrupt Wall Street criminals is a bad thing.

[bsder]

> until it turned out that the public are easy to convince that effective prosecuters should lose their jobs if they visit sex workers.

Well,at the time, I wondered how they nailed Spitzer. In retrospect, I suspect this was one of the first parallel construction scenarios.

However, I don't really care if people visit sex workers. Nevertheless, Spitzer was an anti-prostitution crusader. He deserved to lose his job for the hypocrisy.

[dmix]

He wasn't trashing the fact they are going after insider trading, it's that they use lengthy jail time as a badge of winning. When there are better metrics and means of enforcement than endless jail-time.

[jamesaguilar]

I don't know if you remember, but many heads of banks were brought before congress to answer for the financial crisis. But it just turned out that many of them had not done anything illegal (or at least, not provably so).

[dredmorbius]

Congress doesn't have prosecutorial powers against citizens (it has power of impeechment against select government officials). You can be held in contempt for failure to appear, but you cannot be convicted on the basis of what is said, absent action by the courts.

[jacalata]

Have you not heard the phrase "too big to fail?" Unfortunately for mt gox, nobody with power relies on it continuing to exist, but they do rely on the continuing existence of a banking system in the US.

[ewoodrich]

"Federal Government and State Attorneys General Reach $25 Billion Agreement with Five Largest Mortgage Servicers to Address Mortgage Loan Servicing and Foreclosure Abuses"

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/February/12-ag-186.html

It's not jail, but then again, I highly doubt Karpeles or anyone at Gox will be imprisoned, either (for a number of reasons).

[saalweachter]

In the US, we have a fetish for proving people guilty. That's not to say our false conviction rate isn't through the roof, but even though everyone knows that someone is totally guilty, we don't do anything unless we can prove it.

So the sad fact of the matter is, if someone is a good enough criminal -- for instance, a CEO of a company with dozens of lawyers to advise him, who actually manages to not put anything in writing, and has enough firewalls between him and the activities in question to create reasonable doubt and plausible deniability -- he can totally get away with it.

On the other hand, if someone shows up and it's all amateur hour, and they all but gift wrap a big pile of evidence of their misdeeds, notarize and hand-deliver it to the authorities, we shouldn't hold off on prosecuting them just because smarter, bigger criminals are getting away with it, any more than we should hold off prosecuting the easy homicides just because the hard ones go unsolved.

[alexeisadeski3]

There's not a whole lot of political will to prosecute the consumers who lied on their mortgage forms, so I doubt it'll ever be acted upon.