President Obama should have thrown the banksters in jail.
That's more or less what former Federal Reserve chairman
Ben Bernanke said in an interview this weekend with USA Today.
Bernanke doesn't get off totally scot-free here.
If he really felt that way back in 2009, he could have said so publicly.
Yes, the Fed "isn't a law enforcement agency," but its word still carries a lot of weight in Washington and around the world.
If Bernanke, as the Fed Chair, had said that it was a good idea to prosecute bank executives, that would have put a ton of pressure on the Justice Department to do so.
But anyways, all questions of personal responsibility aside, Bernanke is right.
We SHOULD have jailed more banksters after the financial crisis, and the fact that we didn't -- and still haven't -- will go down in history as one of this administration's biggest screw-ups.
That's because the only thing that actually keeps big financial institutions in check is prosecutions.
Just ask Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
In the wake of the savings and loans debacle of the 1980s,
the Reagan and Bush administrations prosecuted over 1,000 different individuals for their role in the crisis, and of those prosecutions, 839 resulted in convictions. The Reagan and Bush administrations also stripped the S&L's of their assets, nationalized them, and then resold them to the public using a special agency called the Resolution Trust Corporation.
Not coincidentally, the S&L's have been remarkably stable ever since.
President Obama should have done what Reagan did.
He should have thrown the Wall Street banksters in jail.
