Jon Stewart on Wednesday suggested that a recent cheating scandal in Atlanta was nothing compared to the fraud carried out in the leadup to the 2007 housing crisis.
“Why do the particulars of this grade inflation scandal feel so familiar to me?” Stewart said, reporting on a teaching scandal in which educators were convicted of fraud for inflating students’ grades to protect their jobs.
Stewart rolled footage of reports breaking down the systemic cheating baked into the housing bubble, where credit agencies gave bogus AAA ratings to investments and loan officers fabricating borrowers’ financial details and encouraging them to lie.
Stewart tried to tease out the differences between the two scandals, ticking off the similarities: a culture of systemic fraud, lying in pursuit of profit, and widespread intimidation of whistleblowers.
“There’s gotta be some difference between these two stories — what could it be?” he asked.
After Stewart discovered that the teachers and administrators involved in the Atlanta scandal were all punished with jailtime, he turned to see the matching results on Wall Street.
The tally for the financial institutions off to prison, according to a recent story in the New York Times Magazine, was exactly one prosecution resulting in conviction and jailtime.
Watch the clip:
