With the news that Attorney General Eric Holder is resigning, many journalists are rightfully touting his record on civil rights issues. His record on reining in Wall Street is less sparkling.

Holder took over the Justice Department in 2009. It was at a time of national crisis, with the economy cratering and millions of Americans out of work. His job was not, of course, to rebuild the economy. It was to hold accountable those who caused the crisis. On that, he has fallen woefully short: Criminal prosecutions of financial crimes have been rare under Holder’s DOJ, and it will have consequences for years to come.

To understand why, think back to before the Great Recession. In the early and mid-2000s, a housing bubble built up as borrowers took on more and more debt to take out mortgages on new homes. Lenders packaged these sub-prime loans into complicated financial products and sold them to investors, not caring about their quality. But even if the borrowers defaulted, investors reasoned, housing prices wouldn't fall across the entire country, thereby allowing investors to foreclose on the house and recoup their money. But borrowers everywhere defaulted, housing prices plummeted nationwide, and banks were left holding massive amounts of toxic assets that were worth pennies on the dollar. Eventually, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the federal government passed the Toxic Asset Relief Program to bail out the banks.

Why did borrowers take out loans they couldn’t pay back? Most of the blame lies with the banks and their executives. David Dayen has documented the massive fraud committed by banks before the crisis. As he explained one year ago:

The originators faked the appraisals to make bigger loans, and fudged the income statements of their borrowers. The banks sold bonds backed by these mortgages to investors without revealing the shoddy quality of the loans. They knew about the shoddy quality – they hired third parties to examine the mortgages – but when they found all the toxic stuff, they used that information to get a discount from the originators, rather than pass on the warnings to investors. When the investments started going bad, investment banks used fraudulent accounting as bad as Bernie Madoff, taking large segments of their toxic assets off the books, pretending risky assets were safe, hiding the truth from shareholders and regulators.

Under Holder’s leadership, the DOJ has brought and settled civil cases with many banks for these crimes. Last November, JP Morgan reached a $13 billion settlement with the DOJ. In July, Citigroup settled for $7 billion. Most recently, the department announced a record $17 billion settlement with Bank of America. Holder and the department have often touted these settlements as evidence that they are being tough on the banks. But often the top-line numbers on the settlements overstate what the banks will actually pay. Bank of America, for instance, may only pay $12 billion.