How convenient for him to say this after the statute of limitations on many applicable laws has now passed… https://t.co/ItpgGxtx62
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 4, 2015
From the USA Today, “Ben Bernanke: More execs should have gone to jail for causing Great Recession“:
… “I think there was a reasonably good chance that, barring stabilization of the financial system, that we could have gone into a 1930s-style depression,” he says now in an interview with USA TODAY. “The panic that hit us was enormous — I think the worst in U.S. history.”
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.”…
Still, he does acknowledge some missteps by the Fed. Analysts were slow to realize just how serious the economic downturn would become, and he faults himself for not doing more to explain to Americans why it was in their interests to rescue the financial firms that had helped cause it.
“Every time I saw a bumper sticker which said, ‘Where’s my bailout?’ it hurt,” he told Capital Download…
Not as much as it hurt a lot of genuinely suffering people, Mr. Bernake. Video at the link, if you can stand six minutes of self-congratulation.
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Apart from the usual plethora of putzes, what’s on the agenda for the evening?