On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that TD Bank would become the largest bank to plead guilty to charges related to money laundering and that it would pay a landmark $3 billion in penalties spread across financial regulators.
The amount of the fine was extraordinary, but in another respect, the TD case was like every other bank enforcement case: None of the executives responsible are going to jail, at least for now. This trend of banking executives being allowed to skate on criminal charges goes back decades, with perhaps the most famous example being the financial crisis of 2008, when the Feds sent a single mid-level Credit Suisse executive to jail.
