Except a massive amount of money was printed in order to make this happen. That money went into the pockets of the 1%, but the money coming back to the FED comes from the taxpayer (which is mostly income tax) and small-time customers of the banks.

This is the sort of reasoning like the one defended in the article. Of course it's hard to pin blame ... as many individuals worked together to commit the fraud. To me, that seems trivially easy, that means the institution itself, and it's officers (directors and up) are responsible. Because it's fraud, which is criminal, it's not the institution, but the officers directly. Criminal law also has the provision that if you didn't know it was a crime, that doesn't matter : you should have known.

Furthermore this does not mesh with the fact that none of the banks have been forced to make the victims of their fraud whole. None of the CDS investors have received the theoretical value of their investment from the courts, and only very few have even received the amount they paid back. Most got pennies on the dollar. None of the people who lost their house due to foreclosure got it back, BUT when the banks started getting losses because the market dropped when they foreclosed too much, THEN the government stepped in. Then Obama took radical action. Trillions of dollars. Trillions. I don't even know how many zeroes that number has.

Nope, sorry. The Obama government directly, and knowingly decided to legally protect the banks, and even to protect the banks from the consequences of their own fraud (because this fraud they committed resulted in loans not getting paid off ... no worries ! Obama stepped in. Not to protect homeowners, of course, but to protect the banks, make them whole [1]).

And yet ...

When 5 youths rob a store (only one of them, of course, actually stealing anything) ... there doesn't seem to be any problem convicting all 5 of them. There was no proof whatsoever that more than one did anything wrong at all (I'm still thinking the odds of some of them just happening to be in that store not actually in on the crime are pretty good). Happened just this week. Somehow the same reasoning does not apply to banks.

When a 20000 person protest is going on, and 2 of them throw rocks at stores, there is no problem with the police using serious violence against everyone, with them knowing full well that the vast majority have done nothing wrong. Needless to say, broken bones caused by the police are not in fact paid for by the government, not even when there isn't even the slightest claim that the owner of the leg did anything wrong. Not the slightest thing. And of course, prosecutors and courts side with the police.

And let's just not mention what I found when looking into wiretapping. The police has THOUSANDS of internal complaints about abuse of wiretapping. ZERO cases were prosecuted. Zero. Worse: the police actually defended 2 stalkers where the fact that they were being stalked by police officers who got wiretaps on them became obvious to the victims. Bush/Obama/Trump: all the same. They weren't just fraudster-in-chief, but also sexual-abuser-in-chief.

When I get victimized by a fraudulent transaction, the bank is quick to pin it on me. And yet I keep hearing no end of stories that the reverse is also true: when there are fraudulent transactions it is ALSO pinned on the merchant (and I've since come to know how this system works, this is actually true: it results in punishment (financial loss) both for the customer and the merchant. Not, of course, for the bank). Needless to say, courts nearly always side with the bank.

You see, pinning blame is not hard. Even when "it is hard to pin fault on any individual" somehow the justice system seems to find the small guys, and have unreasonable demands on them (see the fraud example above, for some reason both the customer and the merchant get forced to make a big effort to prove they're not at fault. If they don't make this effort, they get screwed, hard. If they do, nobody cares).

[1] http://peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/F... (and many other papers)