Banking and Looting

The earliest chronicles of the recent financial meltdown “tended to portray it as a tale of groupthink and mania, of hubris and shortsightedness: all these smart people got it wrong!” Christopher Hayes writes that while that is true of many, it’s also clear that plenty of people on Wall Street knew that a crash was coming—and that they responded by grabbing all the profit they could. Hayes thinks there ought to be serious criminal consequences for this looting.