Well, the odds of getting caught are near nil... and, then, if they are caught, the cost of having been caught, relative to the profits made by cheating people, is roughly akin to having to pony up to renew a fishing license.
The government takes the $ from the little fines they levy... but never bother to force the banks to make whole all the people they've cheated out of their life savings. Government also never removes any miscreant from the market. The government pretends to enforce the laws... to "foster confidence in the markets"... even when there shouldn't be any, and, otherwise, government works to enable the perpetrators, rather than enforce the rules required to enable a free market to function.
Bankers never go to jail... they only get promoted for doing bad things and getting away with it.
In result.. there really is no integrity left in the markets, and no reason to have any confidence... and everything is devalued and continually shrinking in value because of it. The pie shrinks... and the bankers steal more and more of the shrinking pie over time. The rich grow richer... the middle class become poor.
The banking system, being based in fraud, is made permanently unstable... liable to fail at any moment... and, knowing that, they've already fully planned out what they'll do the next time there's a problem that causes them to lose their capital: they'll just take all the money the depositors put in the bank, and while taking ownership of your money, they'll call it a "bail in" instead of "theft"... or "a bank failure"... while thinking that it won't matter.
The smartest people don't play games with these cheaters, and lose, but they do insulate themselves from them, and they teach their kids that all bankers are criminals, while giving basic instruction in making torches from pitch, and showing them how to use pitchforks, tie slip knots, and build scaffolds and guillotines. The world has always worked that way...
When the level of fraud gets bad enough, the unchecked extent of the fraud run rampant causes the markets to fail, completely... and the bankers all go broke... along with anyone who trusted them... the self correcting features of the markets thus making things better, by allowing failures to fail.
That's what happened here, back in 2008.... except...
Banks that fail MUST quit practicing fraud... unless, of course, the government rides to the bank frauds rescue... giving piles of your money to the poor banker frauds to ensure they can continue propagating their frauds, in spite of having failed because of their frauds. So then, instead of being forced into correcting their bad behavior by their market failure, they are rewarded for it. When the market is prevented from punishing those bad behaviors with failure, the bad behavior grows and grows until it puts the criminals in charge of the system, and then the fraud grows extensive enough, pretty quickly, to cause the government to fail, too.
Given the periodicity in the timing of the cycles in the practice of fraud are remarkably predictable... around 8 years, currently... we're already getting pretty close to an exponentially increasing chance of realizing that risk, again, pretty soon.
Negative interest rates are one remarkably clear signal that "the market" has ceased functioning properly... showing you there is almost no one else left to join in the Ponzi scheme who can enable keeping it afloat. Negative interest rates... are the bankers attempting to hypothecate a proxy for new Ponzi participants... trying to "print" a proxy for new people... by growing the leverage they're applying to the existing cadres they've already enlisted in the scheme. It won't work very well... and it won't work for very long.
Negative interest rates are like the fuel warning light in your car... telling you that no matter how smoothly it appears things are running right now... they're not going to continue running that way for very long. Only, negative interest rates are also telling you that when you do run out of fuel, there's not going to be any gas at the gas station, either...
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