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Comment by BoredPositron | Hacker News Reader

Steve Eisman (short holder against cdos) said the following in 2008:

>> We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball... What bothers me ins't that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did.

He was right and it got even worse, there should have been no bailout. It set a dangerous precedent that is still haunting us, effectively granting those responsible impunity.

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Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that

Court records are public. People have been charged and arrested, like this story and many others. FTX founder got 25 years. To say fraud is being unpunished is unsupported by the evidence. This was true in the early 2000s when Enron and WorldCom execs were charged and got long sentences.

As bad as fraud is here, it's likely worse compared in other countries when controlling for demographics. I think only China is harder on fraud, in which death penalty is used.

Your examples are the ones that stole the money from the wrong guys. If you just go for the middle or lower class nothing will happen to you. Look at the Sacklers... for a more recent example. Purdue settled for $24 million, admitting no liability, sealing the deposition.

> for a more recent example. Purdue settled for $24 million, admitting no liability, sealing the deposition

I'm not sure that's "the Big One," though. The Sacklers keep trying to make bigger and bigger settlement offers, on the condition they are shielded from civil action, and the settlements keep getting nuked.

You are right I wasn't up to date but it's still peanuts standing against the $35bn [1] in profits from oxy. They basically settled to pay 15 years of interest on it with 0 jail time for executives. These settlements are also always the same they NEVER exceed or even match the fraudulent profits. If I steal $100 from you and I’ll pay $24 back in $2 installments over a year you wouldn’t call it justice you probably would call it fraud.

>> On January 23, 2025, the Sackler family and Purdue settled the lawsuit they faced, in a $7.4bn deal with states and individuals. The Family agreed to pay $6.5bn over 15 years, while Purdue agreed on $900mn in settlements. [2]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-tha...

[2] https://ft.pressreader.com/1389/20250124/281663965680298

Can't read the stories, but I'd be interested in seeing whether or not the family got the shielding they wanted.

UPDATED

Sorta-kinda:

> The new deal is structured so that the Sacklers are not given automatic protection from liabilities, but victims will need to agree to not pursue further legal action in order to receive a payout, according to the New York attorneygeneral office’s statement.

Looks like they just made it difficult to go after the family, as opposed to impossible. This kind of thing is not unusual.

The trick is that the victims need to get a fairly substantial (to them) payout, to agree to give up their right to sue.

It's likely that lawyers will try to convince people to not accept the payouts. If the settlement isn't generous enough, they may be successful.

"justice"

In China, fraud runs rampant. A huge punishment for few unlucky individuals does not change much. You would need systematic enforcement, so that chance of being punished is high - and you don't need super huge punishment for that.

Both in USA and Hina, fraud is celebrated and praised on. It is enabled again and again. You see it in Sillicon Valley, you see it in White House and on Wall Street.

Story from an airline pilot who regularly flew to Beijing and visited a mall that was primarily focused on air crews shopping there. Lots of fraudulently unbranded versions of major brands being sold to these crews at extraordinary discount.

Every so often all of the stores would close their store and one would become ‘tribute’. They’d put a table full of whatever product they sold out in front of the closed store and the police would come in, confiscate the limited quantity offered and leave. The stores would reopen a few minutes later and everything would go on as before.

The Chinese government touted these ‘raids’ as evidence they were being tough on infringement.

Hilarious theatre; just like all fraud and enforcement of it, even here in the US. The government targets a few big names who got caught because of their hubris, sends them to jail, and the world continues doing the same thing.

I remember markets--nearly malls--of pirated software in Hong Kong during the 90s. I felt little compunction about shopping there, given how much was difficult to get any other way.

That said, part of the lackadaisical response is because most of the economic victims were foreign companies.

The Chinese police would have acted rather differently if the angry calls for enforcement were coming from Chinese brands and local politicians beholden to those interests.

> For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once.

A statement like this can only come from someone who has never heard of Ea Nasir.

That’s “Ea-nāṣir”.

> What bothers me [isn't] that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean.

What bothers me is that fraud stopped being taboo. People started to revel in it, to brag, and--to the detriment of America--promote and vote-for braggarts of fraud.

> When the hell did we forget all that?

It started to become venerated as a sign of power: "Look at me, I blatantly did X and evaded the expected consequences, therefore I must be doing something worth allying with."

A kind of self-reinforcing bubble, like "too big to fail", except "too smart/crooked to get punished".

Kind of makes you think, that all those ancient texts about greed, corruption, temptation, lust, and so on, was all real. Truly real, those things are here at scale and always have been. Just echoing your post, but, some things need to be echoed for eternity.

> For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that?

The problem is that for far too many people fraud and short sighted thinking have been working out great. Really great. Fraud and short sighted thinking have been making people money hand over fist. It's turned people into billionaires. Occasionally one of them gets a slap on the wrist, on extremely rare occasions one of them will end up behind bars, true, but the more money you make the less likely that becomes. Eventually you get people who are literal serial killers but are basically untouchable because even while they commit crimes repeatedly, publicly, admittedly, they are rich enough to be above the law.

The "eventually you get caught" argument no longer holds up.

The "things go south" argument is still true, but things don't go south for the people making a fortune committing crimes. They go south for the rest of us.

The solutions to fraud and corruption haven't changed. It takes transparency and accountability. Until we have those things consistently both corporations and assholes will continue to do whatever makes them the most money regardless of what laws they break or who gets hurt.

I think people have forgotten they massively outnumber the billionaires by a gigantic margin, in large part, because the billionaires have convinced them that one day, if they work hard enough, they too can be billionaires, and they are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, rather than doomed to always be stuck to the bottom of the billionaire’s shoes.

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