Six banks - $8.2 trillion in bailouts, 350 major legal actions, $200 billion in fines

The banks are Bank of America, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo. Better Markets has done a thorough analysis of these megabanks going back to the Great Recession. Here are the legal actions they have found:

Pre-crash: Bogus charges for credit monitoring services, overdrafts based on false balance information, illegal bid rigging, tricking subprime borrowers into buying credit insurance, selling unnecessary credit-card add-on products, providing conflict-ridden stock research analysis, trading ahead of clients, misrepresentations in the sale of auction rate securities, anticompetitive practices in the bond market, unlawful payment schemes to win muni-bond business, misallocation of public offering shares, antitrust violations, excessive overdraft fees on checking accounts, and opening millions of fake accounts; 

Crash-related: Fraud and abuse in the sale of mortgage-backed securities, loan servicing and foreclosure violations, betting against mortgage-backed securities that were sold to clients, use of invalid credit ratings for mortgage-backed securities, and steering subprime borrowers into more costly loans and falsifying income information; 

Post-crash: Unlawful debt collection practices, breach of fiduciary duty, market manipulation, anti-money laundering violations, unlawful securities lending practices, claims relating to the London Whale derivatives trades, abuses in the sale of credit monitoring services, error-ridden debt collection practices, failure to disclose adviser conflicts of interest, misrepresentations about foreign exchange trading programs, forcing clients into insurance policies, and kickback schemes involving title insurance. 

U.S. taxpayers didn’t provide $8.2 trillion to bail out these banks and save them from bankruptcy in 2008 for them to continue the crime spree that actually caused the crash in the first place. These simply are not the types of banks—and these are not the types of activities—that should be backed by U.S. taxpayers.