Law Commons^™

Criminal Prosecutions And The 2008 Financial Crisis In The U.S. And Iceland: What Can A Small Town Icelandic Police Chief Teach The U.S. About Prosecuting Wall Street?, Justin Rex

Concordia Law Review

Politicians, journalists, and academics alike highlight the paucity of criminal prosecutions for senior financial executives in the US in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. One common argument for the lack of prosecutions is that, though industry players behaved recklessly, they did not behave criminally. I evaluate this claim by detailing the civil, and small number of criminal, actions actually taken and by reviewing leading arguments about whether behavior before the crisis was criminal. Rejecting the “reckless innocence” explanation, I provide examples of criminal behavior that could have been prosecuted and review the literature on why there were few …