WASHINGTON D.C. - Citizen Works today criticized state and federal regulators for letting big Wall Street banks off the hook with a miniscule and potentially tax-deductible assessment with, astonishingly enough, no required admission of wrongdoing.

"This settlement is an insult to the millions of investors who lost hundred of billions of dollars because of the misleading information they received from these bank and brokerage analysts, who, for their own collateral profits, continued to issue 'buy' recommendations even as companies' shares plummeted," said Citizen Works founder and consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

The $300 million fine to Citigroup is less than 1 percent of last year's revenues, which top $92 billion. Likewise, Credit Suisse First Boston's fine of $150 million is barely pennies on the dollar of its last year revenue of $56 billion. These fines come nowhere near the hundreds of billions of dollars that investors lost.

"Although the settlement makes many document public, without an admission of wrongdoing from the banks, defrauded small investors, who already have had the decks stacked against them by years of rolling back investor rights to seek restitution in the courts, now will have an even more difficult time getting their day in court," Nader said.

Nader also criticized the settlement as the inevitable conclusion of weak white-collar prosecution at both the state and federal levels that does not offer a credible deterrent.

"This is what happens when corporate crime prosecution budgets are so inadequate," Nader said. "Corporate defendants are receiving clear signals that neither the state nor the federal government is going to enforce criminal charges for blatantly defrauding small investors. When common criminals commit a burglary, they go to jail. Until the law starts putting corporate criminals behind bars for periods that fit their crimes, investors will be neither satisfied nor able to trust the markets."

Citizen Works called on federal and state governments to increase resources devoted to corporate crime enforcement and called on Congress to repeal the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which made it more difficult for defrauded investors to sue and helped create a more consequence-free environment for many investment advisers. Congress should eliminate, not manage, conflicts between bankers and analysts by mandating structural reforms to the investment banking industry that go beyond the five-year period prescribed in the settlement for banks to fund "independent research."