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Taibblog: Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi “If the allegations in these settlements are true,” says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, “it’s management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims.” To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements - whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions - from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom - an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities - has ever been convicted. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18. This article appears in the Maissue of Rolling Stone. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules'