> "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say

Some people might consider it idiotic to post 3 broken links to articles they clearly haven’t read; others would simply consider it obnoxious.

> the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.

TARP fraud wasn’t what caused the crisis. The popular narrative is that the credit rating agencies failed to do due diligence because they were making a lot of money handing out high ratings on junk CDOs. So far as I know, no one involved in this went to jail. People were angry about the events that led up to the crisis not being punished; most probably didn’t even know about the fraud that went on with the program set up to bail out the banks after the fact.