There's a world of difference between failing to meet an obscure filing deadline and purposely defrauding and misappropriating with full knowledge of what he was doing, as is alleged here. Surely you understand the difference in an alleged crime like his and this nebulous running afoul of complicated federal laws thing you speak of? Speaking of the "federal laws are too complicated to comply with" meme, it's common among those with a libertarian bent but there's not much truth to it. I ran a financial services and software firm for many years that involved transferring large amounts of money between tens of thousands of customers and never ran into any of these alleged nefarious federal laws. I'd be more than happy to have a determined prosecutor look at everything we/I did and I don't have even the faintest worry that I'd be "put away" for a day, let alone a long time. I think certain news outlets find the one poor guy in North Carolina who inadvertently ran afoul of the structuring laws or the rancher in Nevada who wouldn't pay his grazing fees and turn it into a feeding frenzy about vast out of control bureaucracy, when they aren't representative at all of reality.
Are you friggin' serious?! If you knowingly engage in an illegal activity for personal gain, like approving subprime mortgage loans to risky borrowers with very poor credit, that's fraud. The mortgage originators, like Countrywide, are especially culpable here because they knew majority of these borrowers had no chance of paying back the loans. However, the biggest culprit is the Wall Street investment banks that pooled these mortgages into CDOs and sold them to unsuspecting investors. To make things worse, these bastards actually insured themselves using credit default swaps while unloading the worthless CDOs.
Yeah, like that asswipe who robbed a bank and immediately uploaded the entire video he shot to all the social media for the entire world to see. Very smart.
It's a lot easier to prove what Shkreli is alleged to have done than to prove that a banker "knew majority of these borrowers had no chance of paying back the loans." It's a banker's job to determine if a borrower "has a chance of paying back a loan", and you're asking a jury of non-bankers to second guess their professional decision. That's almost impossible to prosecute, absent a smoking gun like emails where bankers specifically say "we're making these loans knowing the borrowers won't pay them back because it will make us a lot of money". It's not to say that there weren't crimes committed in the subprime mortgage debacle, it's just saying that it's a much harder thing to prosecute and a very different thing than the relatively cut and dry case against Shkreli. The only thing they have in common really is that they both occurred in the finance industry, so it's a bit of a non-sequitur to equate the two.
Had Shkreli not been so stupid to earn the wrath of the public by raising the price of Daraprim by more than 5000%, especially just ahead of presidential election next year, he would have flown quietly under the Fed's radar. But, surely, Shkrelli can't be the only one on Wall Street who has, is and will be defrauding his investors. So why aren't they yet busted by the Fed? Because they ain't stupid like Shkreli. Moreover, does Shkreli have a Goldman connection? Probably not. Now you know why I think he's such an asswipe. He should have used his time and money courting the favor of Blankfein & Co. instead of dubbing himself as the wonder boy of Wallstreet.
If your Feds refers to the Federal Reserve, that Fed never owned AIG shares except overnight. The Fed simply facilitated the transaction for Treasury. The shares went right to Treasury. Treasury did ultimately make a good bit of money on that one. They lost a bit on the GM deal overall. The entire TARP/bailout business is not complete yet, but it appears as though it will end up not costing the tax payer one red cent. Not even an openly fascist government could have done it any better.
Because he isn't as connected as the others. Wall street donates generously to both parties so moral hazard becomes a non issue for the banks. Marty is a ruthless person but he forgot that the government can be ruthless as well.