Way back in the olden thymes, bankers went crazy and we ended up with the S&L Crisis. Bank fraud, bubbles, busts and system collapse are regular features of banking. The reason is simple. Banks attract bank robbers. The role of government is to police the banks, arrest the robbers when they find them and then make examples of those bank robbers by putting them in cages for long periods. It is not perfect, but it keeps the banking system of a nation working in an orderly fashion.

In the Clinton years, that all changed. We stopped putting bankers in jail. In fact, we stopped arresting them entirely. Instead, it is a free-for-all in finance. Here’s yet another story of systematic bank fraud that will result in no action by the government.

Derivatives regulators told the U.S. Justice Department they’ve found evidence of criminal behavior following an investigation into banks’ alleged manipulation of ISDAfix, a benchmark used to set rates for trillions of dollars of financial products.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which first sent subpoenas to the world’s largest banks in November 2012 to determine whether ISDAfix was rigged, has flagged its findings to prosecutors, according to a person familiar with the matter. The CFTC’s enforcement powers are confined to bringing civil, not criminal, cases. It isn’t clear who the CFTC suspects broke the law.

Benchmarks like ISDAfix, which is used to track prices on interest-rate swaps, serve as the foundation of global finance, helping pension funds determine their future obligations and lenders decide how much to charge borrowers. Regulators around the world are probing allegations that measures used to set prices in gold, oil, interest rates and currencies were rigged by banks and brokers wanting to pad their profits while cheating their clients and other investors.

Last week, the Alaska Electrical Pension Fund accused 13 banks including Barclays Plc (BARC), Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. (C) as well as broker ICAP Plc (IAP) of conspiring to manipulate ISDAfix. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority is also looking into allegations of wrongdoing involving the benchmark.

Representatives of the Justice Department, CFTC, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup and ICAP declined to comment.

This is not just a few guys stealing. This is systematic theft of public monies by the world’s largest banks. This does not happen without the top level managers knowing and directing it. None of these people can plead ignorance or say that this is an unexpected and un intend consequence. It’s done on purpose.

Bloomberg News, citing a person with knowledge of the matter, was the first to report last year that the CFTC found evidence traders at Wall Street banks instructed ICAP brokers to buy or sell as many interest-rate swaps as necessary to rig ISDAfix by moving it to a predetermined level. Doing so helped banks reap millions of dollars in trading profits, costing companies and pension funds, the person said at the time.

Brokers on the ICAP desk, nicknamed “Treasure Island” because of the large salaries and bonuses they were paid, negotiate swaps trades on behalf of banks. Until this year, the dollar-denominated version of the ISDAfix rate was set daily by ICAP based on data submissions from banks. Amid the CFTC investigation, ICAP lost that central role. The International Swaps & Derivatives Association Inc., or ISDA, picked Thomson Reuters Corp. to take over that job this year.

Deferred prosecution settlements between regulators and banks including UBS AG and Barclays related to London interbank offered rate rigging have compelled firms to hand over information in the ISDAfix and currency probes to avoid criminal prosecution in the Libor case.

The term “deferred prosecution” is a neologism that means no prosecution. If you are a young gun working your way up in finance, you see no risk to this behavior. If you get caught, your bosses cover it up, you keep the money and maybe you have to change firms as a “punishment.” Start putting these guys on The Farm and we suddenly get a new respect not only for the law, but the spirit of the law.