In the mythology of modern finance, risk is rewarded, but only for the powerful. When banks gamble and lose, the cost is socialized. When they win, the profits remain private.
The 2008 collapse revealed this truth in daylight. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, institutions whose recklessness nearly imploded the global economy, were propped up with trillions in taxpayer-backed guarantees. Those public funds were never meant for citizens. They went to stabilize the very hands that caused the quake.
What followed wasn’t reform. It was consolidation.
Bonuses returned, bigger than ever. Share prices soared. CEOs who presided over failure were crowned as saviours. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, whose bank received $25 billion in bailout support, walked away richer and more powerful, later paying record fines for misconduct while the stock climbed higher.
The logic is breathtakingly simple:
crime pays if you’re the bank.
Settlements became line items, the cost of doing business. Regulators punished wrongdoing without disrupting profit. It’s accountability theatre; a show for the masses while insiders divide the spoils.
The most obscene part is that ordinary taxpayers, people losing homes, jobs, and pensions, financed the very bonuses that rewarded the wreckage. The public became the insurer of moral hazard, underwriting greed without consent.
This is the true legacy of the bailout: the creation of a permanent business model where failure is profitable and impunity is policy.
When we say “banksters always win,” it isn’t metaphor. It’s the structure of the game.
Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail reveals that this pattern of financial impunity isn’t new: it’s the modern face of an older alliance. Intelligence agencies, organized crime, and banking elites have always shared one goal: control the flow of money and information.
JPMorgan’s role in shielding Jeffrey Epstein, even after internal warnings about his trafficking operation, wasn’t a fluke. It was business as usual; the continuation of a system where crimes are protected when they serve power.
The bailout, the bonuses, the revolving doors between regulators and financiers; these are not disconnected scandals. They’re nodes in the same network that Webb mapped: a machinery of privilege that launders both money and morality. The details change, but the pattern remains. When corruption becomes structural, it no longer needs to hide.