“Ferguson opined, ‘Not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.’”
I’m gonna have to agree with him on that one.
The private market was doing what politicians told (required) them to do. Politicians wanted to expand home ownership. But once everyone who can afford a house has one, the only way to do that is to lower lending standards and start giving loans to people who can’t afford them. This the government did in spades through its leverage over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (both nominally private organizations). The people who should have ended up in jail—or at least accountable—are sitting in Congress. Instead Congress commissioned a report which took 300+ pages to parrot the progressive story-line: that it was greedy WS bankers that were responsible.
The dissenting opinion by Peter Wallison provides a much more even-handed account of what really happened and in his telling of the story, there’s plenty of blame that should have been shouldered by public officials. http://blog.american.com/?author=5