Abacus Federal Savings

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi  · 8 Apr 2014  · 455pp  · 138,716 words

a Wall Street firm but one housed in the opposite direction, a little to the north—a tiny family-owned community bank in Chinatown called Abacus Federal Savings Bank. As a symbol of the government’s ambitions in the area of cleaning up the financial sector, Abacus presents a striking picture. Instead of

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the plate. The job was left to the states, and even they could come up with only one target. That target, it turned out, was Abacus Federal Savings Bank. There were a million ironies in the choice of this particular institution, but one of the most striking was that the case grew out

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though the federal regulator had the power to force the Sung family to sell the business, or demand wholesale changes to the executive management of Abacus Federal Savings, it did neither. The system seemed to work the way Wall Street and the financial community is always telling us things can work: companies self

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company that we know of that was officially deemed small enough to destroy. Too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail. The case of Abacus Federal Savings showed everyone the outlines of the now obvious, but still unofficial, selective-leniency doctrine. The absurdity of its application in the world of white-collar

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crime, which had consequences for nearly every person in the world who has money or buys or sells anything, and which makes the shenanigans at Abacus Federal Savings Bank seem like kindergarteners whispering during naptime, the UBS parent company completely escaped prosecution. Its Japanese subsidiary was allowed to plead to a single felony

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and perhaps destroy such systemically important companies as UBS and HSBC, and that such actions would devastate the world economy in ways that indicting, say, Abacus Federal Savings Bank had not. But this argument didn’t make sense with regard to individuals, and if you thought about it, it didn’t make sense