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

public utility of throwing a few midlevel peons from a bank like HSBC in jail versus collecting 1.9 billion actual dollars. What’s better, they ask, for the state? What’s better for the people? With some regulatory agencies like the SEC, the settlements they collect go directly to victims. Within the walls of those agencies, the calculus starts to feel exactly like the math employed by any private civil law firm, where you’re weighing the possibility of getting nothing at all versus the chance, today, at $100 million or $200 million. So given these factors, prosecutors will tell you that these massive financial settlements, and the binding deferred prosecution agreements that theoretically give the government enormous leverage over these offender firms, are not only good deals, they’re great deals. This sounds like a good argument, it really does. Trapped in a room with a federal prosecutor who argues for a living, you would find yourself buying it. But it’s bullshit. It’s belied by the entire history of these settlements.