What the Nobel Laureate Says

No, not Paul Krugman, George Akerlof:

As economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said, we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail.

And Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future. See this, this and this.

OK, that's one Laureate, but here is a second, Joe Stiglitz:

An institutionalized system of skewed incentives allowed Wall Street bankers and other corporate executives to gamble with America's wealth and then get away largely scot-free after the house of cards came tumbling down, plunging the U.S. into the worst economic crisis in decades and destroying trillions of dollars of wealth worldwide.

That's the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz, an internationally renowned economist and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. ………

Of course, this will not happen unless the politicians are forced to, because in general, the establishment believes that the big Wall Street Banks must be free to rape and pillage innovate, and in the specific case, Obama likes Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin, and any investigation of the fraud would doubtless have at least one, and possibly all three, of them in the dock facing criminal charges.