The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Financial regulators, too, are expanding their range of targets. Once HSBC and Barclays and UBS and Chase and Goldman and the rest of the Collateral Consequences All-Stars secured their status as unprosecutable, too-big-to-jail institutions, the margin of regulatory error suddenly became that much smaller for the giant subset of All Other Businesses. The SEC tells Congress it makes about 735 enforcement cases a year,*1 and it needs to hit or surpass that number every year to expect its budget to keep flowing. But if the SEC has a powerful disinclination to make those cases against the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world, it’s going to start looking at everyone else’s books far more closely. It’s going after smaller businesses more aggressively than before. It’s profiling, except it’s expanding the profile. And on the flip side, it’s doing the same thing, only in reverse.