What happened
The 2008 crisis wiped out trillions of dollars in household wealth, cost millions of Americans their homes to foreclosure, and required a taxpayer-funded bailout of the banking system. The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's 2011 report referred a number of senior bank executives and institutions to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution over practices including mortgage fraud and misrepresentation of loan quality to investors.
None of those referrals produced a prosecution of a senior executive. No one from Lehman Brothers or Citigroup was criminally charged; no top executive at Bear Stearns was indicted; none of the leadership at Washington Mutual, IndyMac, or Countrywide — the mortgage originators most directly implicated in the underlying fraud — faced criminal charges. Prosecutions for financial fraud actually fell to a 20-year low during the Obama administration, even as the underlying conduct that caused the crisis was, by the government's own investigative commission's account, criminal in nature.
Attorney General Eric Holder's 2014 testimony that some institutions had become "too big to jail" — meaning prosecutors feared a criminal conviction could destabilise a systemically important bank and the wider economy — was a remarkable admission that firm size, not the strength of the evidence, was driving prosecutorial decisions.