October 4, 2015
This season, Ben Bernanke (click here) 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.
"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."...
Well, Ben. It is probably a very interesting book, but, the title does not reflect the need for prosecution and prison. Who was it that was suppose to have the courage to act regarding prosecutions? It isn't as though legislators weren't struggling to justify all that transpired before, during and after the 2008 Global Economic Collapse.
I think the statement by Mr. Bernanke about jailing people responsible defines the idea there are 'Bad Actors.' That is ground breaking. Right now the "Bad Actors" are superstars.
This season, Ben Bernanke (click here) 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.
"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."...
Well, Ben. It is probably a very interesting book, but, the title does not reflect the need for prosecution and prison. Who was it that was suppose to have the courage to act regarding prosecutions? It isn't as though legislators weren't struggling to justify all that transpired before, during and after the 2008 Global Economic Collapse.
I think the statement by Mr. Bernanke about jailing people responsible defines the idea there are 'Bad Actors.' That is ground breaking. Right now the "Bad Actors" are superstars.
