The big traders probably have friends in high places, so I suspect they're going after WSB and not wall street who caused the issues in the first place.
I know of cases from the Danish market where the financial service authorities went for people who had tried driving the price up in a pump and dump scheme for a small penny stock. Using internet forums and a couple of trading accounts.
They made a few thousand dollars and got months in jail for it.
The problem with wsb is that it has gotten so big and there are too many involved at this point.
It's not really that the government can't go after WSB. Sure they're not going to prosecute 2 million degenerates, but it's not like they can't round up 50 of the big names to make a statement.
It's that there's really no appetite in the federal government for going after retail traders. Retail trading as an industry took a very long time to build and ham-fisted enforcement could tank it harder than a few lawsuits ever could.
Make no mistake, this was going to happen eventually. There's infinite ability to gather information, infinite ability to share it. Retail collusion was inevitable. The people who built the industry knew it was going to happen. They prepared for it. Everyone, including the SEC, knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happens.
Denmark did that because there's much greater financial regulatory capture than there is here.
With the amount of media attention WSB has been gaining, this is setting itself up for "Wall Street versus The People" situation. It may be politically tough to go against the retailers now, particularly mid-pandemic and with all the other political comorbidities US is suffering from.
It's been that for a while. Lots of people on social media have been framing it as another Occupy Wall Street, except this time they've figured out how to make the elites hurt. There's plenty of people who don't care how much they lose when it bursts, because Wall Street is set up to lose more.
This is not about "Wall Street versus The People" or WallStreet vs Retail (small investors) it is about federal securities laws. And you know where the law is? In court. I think court needs to decide whether what is WSB doing illegal or legal.
If after bubble pops it's shown that an elite group of WSB traders made huge profits while a large amount of retail traders lost their entire investment, I think there's going to be plenty of public appetite for nailing the market manipulators to the wall.
There is no "probably." It is well-known that people leave their civil servant jobs at regulatory industries, after putting in their time, and bring their know-how and connections to big banks and hedge funds in return for cushy salaries.
There is an NPR (National Public Radio) show called "This American Life" and several years back it had an episode devoted to this. They interviewed regulators. The big banks, for instance, will have an office on site for a regulator. The pull is to "go native" at some point.
