Bank regulators’ failure to understand wrongdoing prevented prosecuting financial crisis fraud.

Evidence

None of the major players in the global financial crisis were charged or prosecuted for financial fraud. Henry Pontell, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, described the difficulty of doing so when bank regulators make no criminal referrals: “When regulators don’t believe in regulation and don’t get what is going on at the companies they oversee, there can be no major white collar crime prosecutions” (Morgenson & Story, 2011). Not only had referrals dwindled to a trickle but, according to Pontell, regulators did not understand the nature and scope of the transgressive activities. “If they don’t understand what we call collective embezzlement, where people are literally looting their own firms, then it’s impossible to bring cases” (Morgenson & Story, 2011). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1558

Categorization

• QUESTION: Collective embezzlement as a distinct criminological concept worth chasing down - it frames insider looting as a systematic rather than individual crime.