The Whale That Should Not Have Gotten Away<br />The hook for The Journal’s screed was the recent decision of Joon Kim, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, to drop charges against two former JPMorgan Chase traders involved in the “London Whale” trading debacle in 2012, when a group of traders lost some $6.2 billion after making big —<br />and decidedly wrong — bets on derivatives using depositors’ money.<br />The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal has asserted<br />that bankers and traders didn’t go to jail for their bad behavior in the years leading up to the financial crisis “because they haven’t committed any crimes.”<br />“Politicians and journalists have made careers of lamenting that too few bankers have been convicted of crimes,” the editorial writers said.<br />Instead of the banks acting to correct the intentional wrongdoing<br />that Mr. Bowen and Ms. Fleischmann revealed to their bosses — which is what you might expect to happen in cultures where wrongdoing is not tolerated – the two bankers were fired and their Wall Street careers ended abruptly.<br />The case of two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers — Ralph Cioffi<br />and Matthew Tannin — was particularly instructive about how poorly federal prosecutors handled one of the very few cases they chose to pursue.
