As recently as two months ago, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board was again attempting to write a revisionist history of the criminal conduct on Wall Street that led to the 2008 financial crisis — the greatest economic bust in America since the Great Depression. Under the subhead “Bankers haven’t gone to jail because they haven’t committed crimes,” the editorial board wrote….
Again, the Wall Street Journal is seriously out-of-touch with its beat. In order “to prove a crime,” the U.S. Justice Department has to actually use one of the many weapons in its arsenal — like subpoenas and wiretaps. That didn’t happen because President Barack Obama put the wrong men in charge at the Justice Department. Again, that intrepid reporting didn’t make its way into the public domain via the Wall Street Journal but via the PBS program, Frontline, and producer Martin Smith. The 2013 program indicated that there wasn’t even a pretense of a real investigation by the Justice Department against the biggest Wall Street banks.
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The lurking danger for shareholders and investors and U.S. taxpayers is that systemic contagion is once again building up among the handful of mega banks on Wall Street that control an obscene share of the nation’s deposits and assets. Ferreting out that information and bringing it to the front page may not be popular with Wall Street advertisers or their legions of lawyers. But it’s essential to maintaining an engaged, free press.