fortyfide ... I guessing that as regarding the latest fraud I said the following, you mean in general, going back to pre 2007?
"Any wrong doing by investment banks individuals, in one of numerous business areas within individual has to be punished, especially if in concert with other investment banks - other than just losing their jobs."
Let me say the following and you make up your mind;
Investment Banking finances the world via the issuance and trading in the bond, equity, money market, forex and commodity markets, providing services to those that need capital, and those who want to provide it.
But generally speaking, this was not a crash called by the more risk/profitable/bonus paying investment banking side, the problems began with high street loans.
The global crash basically began when markets/investors could no longer trust the individual mortgage loans made by mainly U.S. banks to the poorest in U.S. society, called Sub Prime loans, an activity managed and sold on by quasi U.S. government agencies since the 1930's - that large banks had then also packaged up WITHOUT the proper repayment checks in place, into large bond issues, and sold to investors.
In the UK, to meet the mortgage demand, UK banks like Northern Rock, the Halifax and others, whilst not targeting the poorest who might not be able to pay back the loans as in the U.S., followed the U.S. business model in repackaging the individual mortgages into large bond issues and selling them on. This process called 'securitization' was deemed prudent as it transferred the risk from the banks balance sheet to the bond buying investors, and was around 50% of the UK mortgage market by late 2007.
To cut a long story much shorter, all banks are set up to actively manage their many billions of finances daily via the interbank markets.
The banking market could no longer trust the U.S. banks as investors who bought the securitized mortgages could dump them back on the U.S. banks if too many individual mortgages within defaulted - which as a £1 trillion or more of overall U.S. mortgage risk would have sunk those banks, the banks could no longer trust each other and that interbank market closed.
So the facts are; the problem began in the U.S., the threat of inter bank western contagion closed the interbank 'artery' market, which buggered every bank especially those that grew too large due to loans e.g. the UK, even though they thought their risks were being hedged - but even risk hedges can go wrong, if markets shut for the first time in living memory for more than hours, which became months.
Banks especially in the U.S. and U.K were guilty of lending too much to us as they thought the combination of a global consumption 'boom', ever higher asset prices, lower interest rates, and risk hedges to reduced banking risks were in place to protect their banks as fees/profits were being generated - while being encouraged by their respective governments to do so.
Generally speaking individual heads of banks, individually, did nothing wrong other than lend to much too much, which collectively became a huge problem when a (hopefully) once-in-a century financial 'stuff' happened.
Dealers on trading desks knowing committing fraud, which will never be sanctioned by those directors above, are as guilty as hell. IMO