According to experts the following year will be marked with heightened regulation and more aggressive prosecutions after this year of the Ponzi scheme revelations.

John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University, notes that in 2009 the Securities and Exchange Commission became much stricter and it will likely issue more criminal referrals next year. However he doesn’t expect much success for these prosecutions. He says that the cases will likely result in monetary penalties in 2010 but probably will involve "people lower in the food chain."

The practice shows that the regulators’ power failed to efficiently apply punitive measures to the culprits of the financial crisis as the prosecution itself was built on inefficient investigation. The SEC filed 664 civil complaints in the past fiscal year but few major criminal actions related to the financial meltdown were brought by the Justice Department and those, that were brought, failed.

There are many examples of the failed criminal cases. In November, a jury acquitted two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers of fraud in the first major prosecution arising from the collapse of mortgage-backed securities. Later, a U.S. judge tossed out criminal and civil charges against Broadcom Corp's co-founder Henry Nicholas III and former Chief Financial Officer William Ruehle in a stock options backdating case.

"I'm fairly dubious we're going to see any CEOs. I don't think the evidence has been developed."

William Black, a white-collar criminologist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a senior financial regulator during the savings and loan crisis two decades ago, says that the real scandal of 2009 was "the failure to even have an indictment, much less a conviction, of any of the major senior insiders at the nonprime lending specialists."