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Is there no end to 2008?

The US sub-prime housing bubble that burst in 2008 and lead to a massive, world wide financial crisis, is still not over some 8 years later. 

Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, is now in the final stages of settling with the US Department of Justice and is being asked to pay fines of US $14 billion because it was a key player in the 2008 financial fiasco. 

As worded in the National Post (Oct. 1, 2016, FP 6) the bank has acknowledged "misselling mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis". 

Such wording is overly polite and highly misleading. 

Firstly,"misselling" is a very polite way of saying: you did not do your due diligence and sold your customers investments that were 'crap' and you knew it -- or should have known it. 

Secondly, the world wide financial crisis was the end result of these bad securities as they spread the fallout from the US sub-prime housing to banks and investors all around the world. 

If it is required to settle at US $14 billion, Deutsche Bank may well go bankruptcy as the German government has refused to bail it out. 

 In fact, the bank is facing some 7000 lawsuits on this issue and others around the world (G&M, Sept.27, B6). 

So, we are not yet free of fallout from the financial crisis and stupid -- read greedy - decisions of a decade ago. 

Justice has been slow in using her sword, but it is happening. 

As the film, The Big Short, noted at its end, not a single company, CEO or trader was ever charged or convicted for the massive abuse that was the sub-prime mortgage market and the dubious securities that were created on its foundation. 

Maybe this time there will be real consequences. 

As recently noted in Time magazine re: Wells Fargo fraud (see earlier blog), only when CEOs go to jail will Wall Street and its European and Asian equivalents wake up and stop trying to make "money out of nothing".