Prosecute More Bankers!

G. K. Chesterton, the heavyweight champion of wisecrackers, once quipped that it is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. Apparently, Ben Bernanke feels the same way about bankers:

WASHINGTON — This season, Ben Bernanke was able to sit through an entire Nationals game.

During the financial meltdown in 2008, the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve would buy a lemonade and head to his seats two rows back from the Washington Nationals dugout, a respite from crisis. But often he would find himself huddling in the quiet of the stadium’s first-aid station or an empty stairwell for consultations on his BlackBerry about whatever economic catastrophe was looming.

[…]

With publication of his memoir, The Courage to Act, on Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, “but it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.”

I wonder why he didn’t speak up more along those lines when he was, say, Federal Reserve Chairman?

It reminds me of Curly’s little speech during the song “Pore Jud Is Daid” in the musical Oklahoma!:

He loved the birds of the air and the beasts of the field
He loved the mice and the vermin in the barns, and he treated
The rats like equals, which was right.
And he loved little children
He loved everybody and everything in the whole world!
Only he never let on, so nobody ever knowed it.

Nobody ever knowed. Until it would sell more books. Then they knowed.

8 comments… add one
  • Ken Hoop Link

    And Colin Powell knew he would be lying at the UN, which is why his chief aide resigned the day before, Greg Theilmann. Hasn’t he written a self-exonerating book too?

  • Andy Link

    Prosecute…or line them up?

  • Andy Link

    Ken,

    Theilmann retired in Sept. 2002, not the day before the UN speech.

  • Guarneri Link

    “I wonder why he didn’t speak up more along those lines when he was, say, Federal Reserve Chairman?”

    Or why he conveniently excludes from the punishment bankers with considerable advocacy and policy weight, and with the descriptor “central.” Maybe they get a pass, in which case the book should be titled The Courage to Observe.

  • I think a better title would be Publish and Be Damned.

  • ... Link

    Line them up, Andy!

  • steve Link

    Prosecute them. We had a lot more prosecutions for the Savings and Loans crash. Seems like we had at least as much fraud this time.

    Steve

  • Andy Link

    To quote one of my favorite childhood movies, “The Apple Dumpling Gang” I say we give them a fair trial and then hang them. At least I think it’s from the Apple Dumpling Gang – it’s the only thing I remember from the movie.

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