To Do Re Bank Fraud

Most of the big financial institutions in the United States have paid billions of dollars, or at least hundreds of millions of dollars to reimburse government charted entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for what amounts to securities fraud and in connection with improper mortgage servicing practices.  The aggregate amount is probably on the order of $10-15 billion or so, which should probably be spread over several years to be comparable to other data.

On my "to do" list is a goal to total up those settlements and then compare those amounts to the total amount of blue collar property crimes of various types (e.g. bank robbery, car theft) in the United States over comparable time periods.  For example, a 1994 study cited in the link found that:

The study found that the total number of victimizations in 1992 was 33,649,340 and involved 23 percent of all U.S. households. Economic loss of some kind occurred in 71 percent of all personal crimes. For violent crimes, economic loss occurred in 23 percent of the victimizations. Household crimes (burglary, theft, auto theft) involved economic loss in 91 percent of the victimizations. The average loss per crime was $524 and the mean loss was $26. The study contained numerous breakdowns of these numbers by type of crime and type of economic loss.

This would imply an annual economic loss from all crimes combined of about $18 billion a year (in 1992 dollars), with losses predominantly arising from a small number of high economic impact crimes.