So why didn’t they?......8 million lost their homes! Our turn next.
Bernanke: More Execs should have gone to jail
4 October 2015
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.
"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."
He also offers a detailed rebuttal to critics who argue the government could and should have done more to rescue Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in the worst weekend of a tumultuous time.
"We were very, very determined not to let it collapse," he says. "But we were out of bullets at that point."
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.
That is a rare admission of emotion. Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner once described Bernanke as the Buddha of central banking, his demeanor impassive even during disaster.
In the 2011 HBO movie Too Big To Fail, actor Paul Giamatti won a Screen Actors Guild award for his portrayal of the Fed chairman as restrained in all things, from his soft-spoken speech to his choice of oatmeal for breakfast.
In comparison, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson seemed almost volcanic. Not that Bernanke, who retired from the Fed last year, would know about that.
He hasn't seen the movie. "I read the book, but I like to say I saw the original, so it wasn't necessary to see the movie," he says. Will he ever watch it? "If there's nothing else on," he shrugs, "maybe so."