ABSTRACT
The period from 2010 to 2020 that is the subject of this volume witnessed a slow and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, which was the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. President Barack Obama, who had been swept into office in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 2008, sought to restore the economy through massive “shovel ready” infrastructure programs. Those projects proved to be “not as shovel ready as we expected,” but recovery of the economy and markets was well under way when the President left office. The Obama administration’s more striking legacy to US financial history was its “banker bashing” of the “too big to jail” banks that had been blamed for the Financial Crisis. Those banks were charged with massive fraud across a number of markets in high-profile cases brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other regulators. Those prosecutions were marred by the fact that there was no jail time for any senior bank executives. Instead, the large banks were allowed to settle those actions and keep their charters by simply paying fines, albeit in amounts totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. Only relatively small fry traders faced jail time, and several of those prosecutions proved to be unsuccessful.
