In the long-ago epoch when Bill Clin­ton made a cred­i­ble-sound­ing pop­ulist run at the pres­i­den­cy, he hymned the Amer­i­can dream as a com­pact secur­ing a bet­ter future for those who ​“worked hard and played by the rules.” Here at the shank end of the great finan­cial col­lapse of 2008, how­ev­er, the nation­al cre­do is pret­ty much ​“what work?” – and ​“screw the rules.”

One hears many sober ora­tions on the impor­tance of per­son­al account­abil­i­ty for the com­par­a­tive­ly pow­er­less. Undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants are law­break­ers, by def­i­n­i­tion. Union­ized teach­ers and gov­ern­ment work­ers are cod­dled pen­cil-push­ers, irre­spon­si­bly jeop­ar­diz­ing pub­lic aus­ter­i­ty for the sake of their bloat­ed pen­sions and their per­verse desire to bar­gain col­lec­tive­ly with their employ­ers, etc.

How­ev­er, when it comes to the lead­ing issue of our age – the deeply imbal­anced struc­ture of eco­nom­ic reward and pun­ish­ment – no one is respon­si­ble for any­thing. In terms of the law, the 2008 melt­down may as well have been a nat­ur­al disaster.

That was pret­ty much the scene laid out in an April 14 front-page dis­patch by New York Times finan­cial colum­nist Gretchen Mor­gen­son, not­ing just how far we’ve come since the 1,000-plus fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tions in the after­math of the 1980s S&L deba­cle. Mor­gen­son explains that back in the dis­mal autumn of 2008 Tim­o­thy Gei­th­n­er, then the head of the New York branch of the Fed­er­al Reserve, met Andrew Cuo­mo, then the attor­ney gen­er­al of New York and a self-styled cru­sad­er against Wall Street impuni­ty. The two agreed, in essence, that the fix was in: Gei­th­n­er was arrang­ing the mas­sive fed­er­al bailout of the flail­ing AIG, which was hold­ing bil­lions in tox­ic debt the com­pa­ny could nev­er hope to repay. Accord­ing to three Mor­gen­son sources, Gei­th­n­er told Cuo­mo that crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions would be ill-advised at this del­i­cate moment; the shaky finan­cial mar­kets would only freak out fur­ther over the prospect that their mas­ters could be deliv­ered into the hoosegow. (Cuo­mo denies that Gei­th­n­er urged him to retire his pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al author­i­ty and Gei­th­n­er prim­ly insists that he was seek­ing ​“to pro­tect tax­pay­ers” in stream­lin­ing the AIG bailout – a ratio­nale that’s a bit like Kim Kar­dashi­an hold­ing her­self forth as a cru­sad­er against pub­lic indecency.)

And so it came to pass. In the finan­cial crime of the cen­tu­ry, not a sin­gle fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tion has stuck, and pre­cious few have been initiated.

This is not mere­ly a marked con­trast to the unwind­ing of the S&L cri­sis; it also makes for a very awk­ward case study along­side the crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions mount­ed in Britain and Ice­land in the wake of the glob­al Ice­Save scan­dal that pitched Iceland’s pub­lic trea­sury into receiver­ship. England’s Office of Seri­ous Fraud has arrest­ed nine lead­ing bankers – sev­en state­side, and two in Ice­land – and has won the coop­er­a­tion of at least two of them in a widen­ing crim­i­nal inquiry.

In the post-account­abil­i­ty cul­ture of the Unit­ed States, such an out­come is unthink­able. As a case in point, Mor­gen­son repris­es the tale of Coun­try­side Loans’ for­mer brig­and-in-chief Ange­lo Mozi­lo, who orig­i­nat­ed hun­dreds of bil­lions’ worth of ran­cid home loans in Cal­i­for­nia and the Sun­belt. After the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion launched a tepid civ­il com­plaint against Mozi­lo in 2009, he was per­mit­ted to buy his way out of trou­ble with a $22.5 mil­lion set­tle­ment, while pock­et­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions more in cor­rupt­ly pro­cured exec­u­tive compensation.

Mozi­lo elud­ed crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion thanks to reg­u­la­to­ry fail­ure. In 2007, as the Coun­try­wide empire began rot­ting from with­in, the Bush White House placed it under the Office of Thrift Super­vi­sion. Countrywide’s min­der at the agency was John M. Reich, a one­time banker appoint­ed by Bush in 2005. Cal­i­for­nia con­sumer advo­cate Robert Gnaiz­da recalled sug­gest­ing to Reich that the OTS should set up a hot­line to field calls from aggriev­ed Coun­try­wide mort­gage-hold­ers. ​“I told John, ​‘This is what any police chief does if he wants to solve a crime,’ ” Gnaidza told Mor­gen­son. ​“John was unin­ter­est­ed. He told me he was a good friend of Mozilo’s.” Reich now says (sur­prise, sur­prise) that he has no rec­ol­lec­tion of any such discussion.

But real­ly, why dwell on these unlove­ly details? Nowa­days, we take this sort of inten­tion­al mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of finan­cial instru­ments for granted.