Quietly, very quietly, the alarm bells are going off in Europe that the financial markets are acting "mafia-like".

European exchanges have voiced concerns that regulators are unable to monitor and detect what they have described as professionalised "mafia-like" market abuse.

The market's head of trading surveillance, Michael Zollweg, told German journalists last month that the incident was an example of how manipulative trading has evolved into an industry with "mafia-like" international structures.

the real tragedy is when you forget the successes of the past, when you have something that you know works and that you refuse to use. Because, as Michael [Hudson] said, there’s not an economics textbook in the world that warns you that elite CEOs often become wealthy through fraud.

I just got done listening to one of my favorite economists, Michael Hudson, and my favorite banking regulator, Bill Black, talk about the endemic corruption in the financial industry (see videos below). Amusingly, I then found an interview of Bill Black where he quotes Michael Hudson So as an experiment I did a Google news search of "bank fraud" for the last five days. The results went on for pages and pages and pages. Granted that not all the cases were in America, but I doubt that in our globalized world that means much. How can there be so much financial fraud going on and we hear so little about it?The most interesting example was Iceland's ex-PM being found guilty of one count of bank fraud.

“Don’t just say: “If you hit this revenue number, your bonus is going to be this.” It sets up an incentive that’s overwhelming. You wave enough money in front of people, and good people will do bad things.”

- Business Week interview with CEO

Fraud is running rampant in the financial industry. Even if they haven't been taken over by the mob, they are running their businesses like it.

Financial fraud is running at epidemic levels.

Investment fraud is a silent epidemic in this country. For every big Ponzi that makes the headlines, there are hundreds of smaller-scale schemes crashing and burning around the country...

About 150 Ponzi schemes -- the most common type of investment fraud -- collapsed in the year after the Bernie Madoff scheme broke. That's four times the pre-Madoff collapse rate. The SEC issued 82 percent more cease-and-desist orders against alleged Ponzi and similar schemes in the first year post-Madoff.

- Daniel Fischel, Dean of University of Chicago Law School

The take-away that can't be ignored is that there were around 2,000 criminal indictments of bank executives following the S&L scandel. After the far larger 2008 meltdown, not a single bank executive has been sent to jail. Not one.

“Misrepresentations and other improper actions,”—that’s it? This is all just sloppy work where the banks didn’t pay attention to the facts? What an outrage! There are still no criminal prosecutions, let alone any investigations of the major banks that caused a global meltdown. By the time this is over, millions of homes will be foreclosed upon. The bankers that caused the mess have been rewarded year after year with huge bonuses since 2008! The FBI and the SEC can’t find a single criminal act by a single one of these 17 institutions? The incompetent (and I think criminal) scoundrels responsible are still in charge!

‘It has the potential to be an epidemic,” said Swecker, who heads the Criminal Division at FBI headquarters in Washington. “We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis,’ he said.”

As early as 2004 the FBI was warning the Justice Department that there was "epidemic" of financial fraud in the mortgage industry.This was years before the peak of the housing bubble. This was years before the robo-signing scandal.This was years before audits have revealed a majority of foreclosure documents break the law

The obvious fact is that regulating crooks doesn't work. Only prosecuting them.

The problem is that our politicians and regulators aren't even interested in regulating them, much less prosecuting them.

Therefore a new financial crisis isn't just predictable, it is inevitable. After all, if you've found that you can get away with stealing $1 million in broad daylight, what's to stop you from stealing $1 billion? What's more, the financial crisis will likely increase in intensity until concrete steps to punish the criminals finally occurs.

You can bet that when the next financial crisis occurs that the same people will be in front off Congress and in front of the corporate media and tell us that they need another bailout or the world will end. The question is: will you fall for it again?