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COMMENTARY: Don't hold your breath waiting for someone to get charged in the collapse of MF Global, or any other financial institution. In the last 10 years, prosecutions for fraud at financial institutions has dropped by nearly 58 percent. In the last five years, as bank failures have skyrocketed, prosecutions have dropped 28 percent.
In 2000, Bill Clinton's last year in office, there were more than 3,000 federal prosecutions for fraud at financial institutions, according to a report by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). That year the FDIC reported seven bank failures. Prosecutions have dropped every year since then. In 2010, when there were 157 failures, the number of prosecutions had dropped below 1,500.
During the first 11 months of the 2011 fiscal year, the feds filed 1,251 new prosecutions. If that pace continues, TRAC projects a total of 1,365 prosecutions for the fiscal year. So far this year, there have been 88 bank failures.
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