Several years after the financial crisis, which was caused in large part by reckless lending and excessive risk taking by major financial institutions, no senior executives have been charged or imprisoned, and a collective government effort has not emerged, according to an article in today's edition of The New York Times by Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story.

"This stands in stark contrast to the failure of many savings and loan institutions in the late 1980s. In the wake of that debacle, special government task forces referred 1,100 cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than 800 bank officials going to jail.

"Former prosecutors, lawyers, bankers and mortgage employees," the article continued, "say that investigators and regulators ignored past lessons about how to crack financial fraud. As the crisis was starting to deepen in the spring of 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation scaled back a plan to assign more field agents to investigate mortgage fraud. That summer, the Justice Department also rejected calls to create a task force devoted to mortgage-related investigations, leaving these complex cases understaffed and poorly funded, and only much later established a more general financial crimes task force."

William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the federal government's director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis, said in the article that "there were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here."

The article said that "even civil actions by the government have been limited," adding that "the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a broad guideline in 2009 - distributed within the agency but never made public - to be cautious about pushing for hefty penalties from banks that had received bailout money. The agency was concerned about taxpayer money in effect being used to pay for settlements, according to four people briefed on the policy but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it."

Legal experts, the article said, maintained that "prosecutors...might also investigate whether executives cashed in shares based on inside information, or misled regulators and their own boards about looming problems....public comments made by Angelo R. Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial, praising his mortgage company's practices were at odds with derisive statements he made privately in e-mails as he sold shares; the stock subsequently fell sharply as the company's losses became known."

The article noted that last month, the office of the United States attorney for Los Angeles dropped its investigation of Mr. Mozilo after the S.E.C. extracted a settlement from him in a civil fraud case. Mr. Mozilo paid $22.5 million in penalties, without admitting or denying the accusations.

In a January 2010 memo, Brad Bondi and Martin Biegelman, two assistant directors of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, outlined their recommendations for investigative targets and hearings, according to Tom Krebs, another assistant director of the commission. Countrywide and Mr. Mozilo were specifically named; the memo noted that subprime mortgage executives like Mr. Mozilo received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation even though their companies collapsed.

However, the two soon received a startling message: Countrywide was off limits. In a staff meeting, deputies to Phil Angelides, the commission's chairman, said he had told them Countrywide should not be a target or featured at any hearing. Mr. Angelides denied that he had said Countrywide or Mr. Mozilo were off limits and said the investigation was canceled because Republican members of the commission did not want any more hearings.