Daniel Akst in the NYT writes: Shocked by Scandals? These Are Nothing!, claiming that large-scale fraud has always gone on.
But careful reading of his examples shows:
(a) Nothing at all from the New Deal to the 1960s
(b) A penny-ante fraud from the early 1970s (Industrial Equity)
(c) Some bigger ones in the 1980s, which served mainly to lay the groundwork for today. (Akst’s claims that today’s scandals pale into insignificance by comparison is way off the mark, as he just about concedes in the end)

The explanation is simple. The financial regulations, such as the Glass-Steagall act, put in place after the 1929 crash made it very difficult to carry out the kind of frauds we’ve seen lately, where lots of people (auditors, analysts etc) are more or less conscious collaborators. Those regulations were dismantled from the 1970s onwards. The S&L scandal was the first big set of frauds that followed directly from deregulation, and a bunch of others have followed.

In Australia, by contrast, we had some really big fraud, relative to the economy, in the 1980s. That’s one reason things haven’t been so bad here this time around. But at an ideological level, things won’t change until these lessons are learned in the US.