There’s a scene in Frank Capra’s film “It’s A Wonderful Life” during George Bailey’s guided tour of what life would look like had he never been born. He strolls through Pottersville, past the debauchery of exorbitant nightclubs and swanky bars, and finds that his family’s building and loan office went out of business years ago, beat down by the monolithic monopoly of Mr. Potter’s financial empire. The town was effectively in his hands.

There was a scene just five years ago when the U.S. major banks began to fail. Lehman Brothers. Bear Stearns. AIG. Others were on the brink. Behemoths of the banking industry. Victims of their own greed, as they victimized ordinary workers and homeowners by trying to establish salient control over the American monetary structure.

Since President Clinton’s repeal of the important New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, investment banks like Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs have been allowed to pose fictitiously as commercial banks, taking advantage of all the government perks that go along with that. And in the wake of massive and deliberate fraud, the entire structure almost collapsed. It took hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailout money, distributed through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to keep the landslide at Great Recession and not Great Depression Part 2. The takeaway being that, without massive government intervention to save the banks, a financial collapse was almost inevitable, proving that the banks were too-big-to-fail.

The banks, however, are even larger post-bailout. For all the talk about financial reform, from Dodd-Frank to consumer protection to white-collar prosecutions, nothing substantive has been done. And unless substantive moves are made, we’ll be left to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.

There is no doubt in my mind that the CEOs of these institutions, the Hank Goldbergs and Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world, a bunch of pre-Oz Tin Men, belong in jail. From credit default swaps to mortgage-backed securities fraud, reckless financial moves make their lives worth living, as they peer down from their Wall Street alcoves on the pockets they regularly pick. Because, in the end, it’s not their money on the line. It elucidates the quintessential moral hazard of our time, making manifest existential hazards for millions who bear the financial brunt of the risks taken.

Because now, too-big-to-fail also means too-big-to-jail. Prosecutors are struck with judicial rigamortis, as they are amicable to settling cases before trial, thus ensuring that these criminals of widespread fraud never see the inside of a jail cell. Their rationale is calculated politics. Certain people of such elevated wealth and status are deemed too imperative to the inner workings of their establishments that doing time for defrauding investors and bankrupting millions just becomes too much of a burden. If they were in jail, investors would bolt and we certainly can’t risk the repercussions of that, especially when the banks are so big.

The problem is systemic, though. Sure these guys are greedy sociopaths. But what more do you expect out of people who are given so much power that their downfall can bring down the entire economic system, placing us in a figurative political headlock? The system incentivizes their greed, thus setting up the moral hazard. And it’s a long shot from changing. In a country supposedly governed by laws, not men, any veritable reform has been quite inimical to the meritocracy.

When institutions are allowed to run rampant, we begin to operate solely within the parameters that they set. They make the rules and the rules can’t rein them in. To put it simply, they are above the law. If we don’t apply the rule of law to everyone equally, regardless of income, from destitute Americans incarcerated for marijuana possession to those deemed imperative to the financial system, then the rule of law does not exist. Only if we place less capital in the success of bandit banks and remove the stigma of placing corporate CEO’s behind bars, only then will the snow resume falling in Bedford Falls.