Twenty-four hours on, I still can’t quite get my head around the deal Credit Suisse made with the United States government, in which the bank pleaded guilty to helping wealthy Americans evade their taxes by parking money in undeclared Swiss bank accounts. Fortunately, Brady Dougan, the bank’s American chief executive, is way ahead of me.

Speaking in London on Tuesday, Dougan said that the guilty plea—the first by a big bank in over a decade—was having little or no impact on Credit Suisse’s business. “We have found no instances where clients cannot do business with us,” Dougan said. “Our discussions with clients have been very reassuring and we haven’t seen very many issues at all.”

That does sound reassuring, but for whom, exactly? It is surely positive news that the Justice Department has finally overcome its caution about issuing criminal charges against big banks that flout the laws. With a precedent thus established, it should be easier for the government to bring charges against other corporate wrongdoers on Wall Street. That’s all to the good.

But in eliciting a single guilty plea from Credit Suisse, didn’t the Justice Department also have an obligation to hold its senior management to account? Dougan, a low-key Midwesterner, has run the bank since 2007, meaning that he was in charge when Credit Suisse employees were busy meeting with wealthy Americans at plush hotels in the U.S. and helping them set up accounts in Zurich, together with offshore shell companies that helped disguise the ultimate destination of their money. This was no penny-ante operation. It drew in dozens of bank employees, and it involved keeping an office in New York for bankers visiting from Switzerland. By 2006, according to a congressional report released earlier this year, the bankers had opened accounts in Switzerland for twenty-two thousand American customers, and the accounts were worth as much as twelve billion dollars.

In 2011, the Justice Department indicted seven Swiss employees of Credit Suisse for their role in the scam. No senior executives have been charged, though. And now, as part of the guilty plea, which involves the bank paying a fine of $2.5 billion, Dougan has been allowed to keep his job, and so has Credit Suisse’s chairman, Urs Rohner. On top of that concession, the U.S. government hasn’t moved to revoke Credit Suisse’s American banking license, despite Attorney General Eric Holder, in announcing the guilty plea, saying that the wrongdoing amounted to “an extensive and wide-ranging conspiracy.” Evidently, investors agree that the bank got off lightly: on Tuesday, its shares rose a bit.

Ordinary taxpayers, who were never given the option of shifting some of their earnings to Zurich or Geneva, may wonder about the terms of the settlement. So may thousands of convicted tax cheats who have ended up in prison. From Al Capone on, it’s generally been accepted that if you set out to systematically defraud the Internal Revenue Service, a jail cell is your likely destination. The same goes for those individuals who enable others to engage in tax evasion. But now a big and supposedly reputable bank has been found guilty of aiding and abetting tax cheats on a grand scale, and its business is continuing as usual.

Facing a torrent of criticism for not holding to account any senior Wall Street figures for the subprime-mortgage blowup, the Obama Administration was clearly keen to show it was willing to bring criminal charges where appropriate. “This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law,” Holder insisted. Up to a point, that is true. But senior executives at other banks, particularly those that were involved in the great mortgage caper, will probably be more comforted than alarmed by the terms of the settlement.

By charging Credit Suisse and threatening to charge BNP Paribas in a case involving the violation of U.S. economic sanctions, the Administration has shown it is willing to bring criminal indictments against big foreign banks. But that’s a lot easier than charging one of the six big American banks: Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. Despite being up to their ears in the great mortgage caper, not one of these institutions has faced any criminal charges. Where these firms have been indicted, the counts have been civil ones, and, in some instances, they have been settled without any admission of wrongdoing.

Partly, that’s because the Justice Department hasn’t amassed enough evidence to show that the big U.S. banks were involved in deliberate wrongdoing. (In bringing criminal charges, the prosecutors would have to prove intent.) But some senior Administration officials were also concerned, at the height of the crisis, that putting top bankers—or an actual bank—in the dock could add to the panic, and possibly even lead to more collapses on the scale of Lehman Brothers, which failed in September, 2008. This wasn’t necessarily a crazy concern. Twenty-five years ago, the mere threat of a criminal indictment drove Drexel Burnham Lambert, the big Wall Street investment bank, into the ground. And, in 2002, a criminal indictment ended the existence of Arthur Andersen, the big accounting firm.

In overcoming its concerns about the fallout from bringing criminal charges against financial institutions, the Justice Department deserves some credit. Although the punishment Credit Suisse received left the bank largely unscathed, it was considerably more severe than the seven-hundred-and-eighty-million-dollar fine that UBS, its Swiss rival, paid five years ago to settle similar accusations. To banks, and particularly to foreign banks, the risks involved in flouting the U.S. law are increasing.

For all that, though, the unintended legacy of this saga may be to further shore up the position of the biggest financial institutions. After all, the Justice Department has just demonstrated that it’s possible to bring criminal charges against a major bank while leaving its management and business almost wholly intact, and without alarming the markets. If this were to become the norm, it could well undercut the deterrent value of criminal indictments.

Until now, senior bankers have had good reason to believe that if their firms were charged with criminal acts they would lose their jobs and their livelihoods as the place collapsed around them. Brady Dougan has just shown that’s not necessarily the case. For Credit Suisse, at least, being declared a felon wasn’t so bad.

Photograph by Gianluca Colla/Bloomberg/Getty.