The FBI wants to know if there was any fraud in the actions that caused the collapses of Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM), Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE), AIG (NYSE: AIG), and Lehman. The agency may want to save its time. The probable cause of all the trouble was much more likely to have been stupidity.

According to The Wall Street Journal, :Pressure is building for the FBI and regulators to hold top executives accountable for the crisis that has crippled the nation's finance sector."

The FBI is not likely to find criminal behavior. It is likely to find that executives at big financial companies did not understand the most complex financial instruments that they were buying. They did not understand the risk of the value of those instruments dropping if subprime mortgages began to default at historically high levels. These executives pushed to be paid well when the instruments were making money but have not had huge pay cuts now that the results from the investments are causing huge losses. It is none of the FBI's business that CEOs being kicked out of these operations are getting big pay packages.

One of the reasons that there was unlikely to be wrong-doing is that CPAs spend tremendous amounts of time going over the books of large banks and brokerages so that their audit firms are not liable for allowing fraud to make it into financial statements. They learned that lesson from Enron. Fannie and Freddie's books are subject to government scrutiny, which make fraud even less likely.

Looking for criminal actions at the company's is waste of FBI time. The agency probably needs the investigations to look good. They would not want to be accused of being caught sleeping.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.