No worse than the banks, true enough. No different, at the end of the day, except that Madoff's damage is relatively small scale compared with what they have done.   The scandal is that leading bankers aren't on trial as well.

But it's not true to say that white collar crime doesn't kill people. The global economic crisis these incompetent crooks have engineered is going to kill plenty of people.

Read what the head of the World Health Organisation has to say about this, as reported in today's Times Downturn could kill 400,000 children,:

Thousands of women and children are dying as a direct consequence of the current economic crisis which is already derailing efforts to improve maternal care and cut child death rates... an estimate of between 200,000 and 400,000 additional child deaths per year caused by the downturn was "entirely credible".