Another round? When was the first round. The banks have been caught with they hands in the cookie jar at least half a dozen times in the last ten years and nothing at all has been done about it (either from the US or UK side).
I used to be more neutral till the secret recordings of Carmen Segarra came out - http://www.propublica.org/article/so-who-is-carmen-segarra-a...
The fed regulators in question were recorded being eager to be deferential to the very banks they were supposed to regulate, and the very banks that had caused this crisis. And oh, a surprising number of ex-regulators ended up working for the banks they previously regulated. What a coincidence.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/06/23/a-list-of-the-bigg...
Oh and in one final insult, the settlements with the banks will eventually be paid for out of bank revenues - which of course is generated by the public. I'm sure the bank execs are high fiving each other over that maneuver in the backyards of their private Connecticut uber-mansions.
Unfortunately most of what the banks did that caused the 2008 crisis was not against the law.
AIG had to lump it or leave it, because they didn't own the last three Treasury secretaries. GS should have been in the same spot. That they weren't, is the epitome of self-dealing. Fuck that.
Financial crimes are generally slow and difficult to prosecute because of the vast quantity of documentation that has to be sifted through for evidence, so when you look at the DoJ's financial fraud page you see a bias towards smaller firms - not necessarily because they're weaker legally, but simply because it's easier to pinpoint individuals (eg some of the insider trading prosecutions). Another issue specific to the financial crisis is that in some cases large firms erred by being negligent and/or overconfident in their market strategies, resulting in huge losses and/or bailouts, but they imprudent rather than mendacious and their conduct did not cross the line into criminality. In a normal market those firms would have gone out of business and things would have been resolved through civil lawsuits, which was what happened with Lehman bros. and Bear Stearns. But in the financial crisis so many institutions were over-leveraged, and so many markets were moving in sync with each other (eg Europe and US both having huge housing bubbles) that the options were government stepping in to backstop the financial industry as a whole or the collapse of the payment system, which would have been a disaster.
Getting back to politics, my read of the US landscape is that about 20% of the US electorate leans to the left and wouldn't object to hanging all the bankers. About 30% leans to the right, and they've convinced themselves that the whole financial crisis was caused by Those Bums on Welfare and the Democratic party who forced the banks to give money to TBoW. The other 50% of the electorate is more fact- than narrative-driven and while they have misgivings about who should bear responsibility for the crisis they're also more pragmatic and primarily concerned about economic stability. There's a danger in this, insofar as many of the socioeconomic conditions that led up to the crisis remain unresolved or have even worsened in some respects, which means greater political tension and potential for crises; on the other hand revolutionary change is notoriously difficult to manage which is why no developed country has so far attempted to grasp that particular nettle.
I don't really care about settlement amounts in dollars. I'd like to see criminals end up in jail.