What’s the real cost of a financial crisis? Apparently, it depends on who’s paying.

If you’re Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, or Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, it’s a price your $2tn bank can easily afford to make trouble go away.

If you’re a homeowner, it’s a price that has rendered your past five years a struggle of financial anxiety. If you’re an American, it’s a price that has resulted in a recession and recovery characterized by historically high poverty – with 42 million Americans on food stamps – and historically low rates of Americans working, with only 63% of the population gainfully employed.

As you rise up the financial ladder, the consequences of the financial crisis are increasingly arbitrary. The Department of Justice is looking for scalps – finally, after five years of drowsy hibernation – but some banks are whining about merely getting haircuts.

This week, two mortgage-crisis settlements hit the news: one potential and one official. The idea of a $13bn rumored fine to JP Morgan and an $848m fine to Bank of America would indicate two things.

The first conclusion is that the Justice Department, largely led by US Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara, is finally slapping Wall Street for the things that went wrong five years ago. Fine, let’s go with that.

The second conclusion, to any outside observer, is that JP Morgan was guiltier than Bank of America of mortgage abuses because it’s paying a bigger fine. Nope. Whether JP Morgan, Bank of America or Citigroup, guilt in the mortgage crisis was more or less evenly distributed across Wall Street. It’s only the fines that aren’t.

JP Morgan is paying more largely because it can afford to, and its rivals can’t. In the context of JP Morgan’s $21bn of income in 2012, $13bn is manageable. JP Morgan, sitting on over $2tn of assets, can easily take the pain, and Dimon still received an $11.5m pay package last year.

Bank of America, which has already shelled out $40bn in clean-up costs for its acquisition of Countrywide, made a paltry $4.2bn in net income last year: one-fifth of the income of JP Morgan. Bank of America had, at the start of the year, only $1.5bn socked away to pay for mortgage settlements. These are numbers so small that JP Morgan would find them laughable.

Bank of America would find its back broken by the kind of fine facing JP Morgan; it would need a bailout to afford a $13bn settlement. So would Citigroup, which made $7.5bn in 2012 – a third of JP Morgan’s haul – and only paid back its 2008 bailout this year; Citi is still such a work in progress that the Federal Reserve still won’t allow the bank to give its investors dividends.

There’s another difference between the two fines. Bank of America knows its screwed up by doubling down on the mortgage business. In 2011, Moynihan sounded like he was beating himself up daily: "Obviously, there aren't many days when I get up and think positively about the Countrywide transaction."

Dimon, on the other hand, has been in an imperious state of denial.

There has also been a totally erroneous whisper campaign, backing Dimon, that JP Morgan deserves no blame for the mortgage troubles, which came primarily from stepchildren Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns. “We’re doing a good job,” Dimon told employees this month after the bank reported its first loss since 2004, due to its legal settlement costs.

Dimon’s charisma detracts from what really happened. To be clear, JP Morgan and Dimon knew exactly what they were getting into back in 2008 when JP Morgan bought both Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual with government help. These were sweetheart deals that JP Morgan bragged about.

The government allowed JP Morgan three weeks advance notice of WaMu’s demise and allowed JP Morgan to shave $20bn in liabilities off the bank. JP Morgan estimated it might have to take as much as $54bn of losses on mortgages, which it managed to avoid.

Executives also beat their chests to investors at the time of the acquisition:

We had a lot of detail and a lot of very direct conversations. We had probably 75 people at JP Morgan Chase involved in the process, both going through data as well as talking to members of the company,” said one executive. “And it was not a rushed analysis.” Another: “I’ll just tell you it was probably one of the most thorough things we’ve ever done.”

“We bid to win because we wanted to win for a lot of obvious reasons,” Dimon told investors about buying WaMu. “We’re pretty sure we did the right thing for the shareholders.”

That hardly sounds like a bank shoved into a bad deal, does it?

About Bear Stearns, for which JP Morgan predicted $33bn of potential exposure, a former JP Morgan executive was similarly proud in 2008: “we were very pleasantly surprised to see that it was a very well run, tight operation with good risk controls and a risk discipline that was very similar to our own,” he said. Another added about the Bear Stearns mortgage business: “Needless to say, a very, very good strong business and one that in the long run will be very additive ... it’s a business that we are looking to pick up market share in.”

That’s a pretty far cry from JP Morgan’s tune these days, about how it was victimized by two bad banks that were forced on it.That's not surprising. Most banks could sell ice to Eskimos, and they're good at marketing lines that don't stand up to scrutiny.

So here JP Morgan bought two banks that could have had over $80bn in losses together, and did not. JP Morgan is likely to pay $13bn, and it will continue to sail on with its reputation and, eventually its profits, totally untouched.

What’s the cost to you?

If you own a home, the cost of the financial crisis could have been foreclosure, which swept up 4.4m homes. Or the cost could have been standing back and watching your home value go “underwater,” its value sinking below the mortgage you were paying. That was the cost for 12 million people in 2011. Were all these people irresponsible borrowers who splashed out on real estate in an HGTV-impelled frenzy of status-seeking capitalism? No. The consequences of the financial crisis were largely arbitrary to most Americans. It was not only house-flippers who lost their jobs, or mortgage brokers who found themselves deep in debt. Everyone shared the pain with no real rhyme or reason.

We like to believe that history has a karmic arc, that wrongdoing faces punishment equal to the extent of the crime, but recent history shows us that’s not how things work. We can collect only pennies on financial crimes that cost the country trillions in lost growth, productivity and jobs.