No one was handcuffed. No one stood trial. On this day in 1998, 37 Wall Street brokerage houses agreed to pay a record $1.3 billion to settle allegations that they had rigged prices on the NASDAQ stock market for years, systematically widening the spread between buy and sell orders to quietly skim profits from ordinary investors.
It was the largest civil settlement in US history at the time, and that word, civil, is the whole story. The firms admitted no wrongdoing. The money came out of company accounts, not personal fortunes, and the traders who allegedly colluded to fix prices walked away to keep working the same market.
The case became a textbook example of how financial crime on a massive scale is so often processed as a cost of doing business rather than a crime with consequences.
