Bernanke: Wall St Execs Should Have Been Jailed

The former chairman of the Federal Reserve has said Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for their roles in the 2008 financial crisis.

Billions of dollars in fines have been levelled against major banks and brokerage firms after the crisis, which was partly triggered by reckless lending and securities dealings.

In an interview with USA Today, Ben Bernanke said he felt individuals should have been held to account more.

He told the newspaper: "It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm."

Mr Bernanke did not name any individuals he thought should have been prosecuted, and said the Federal Reserve was not a law enforcement agency.

He added: "The Department of Justice and others are responsible for that, and a lot of their efforts have been to indict or threaten to indict financial firms.

"Now (NYSE: DNOW - news) a financial firm is of course a legal fiction; it's not a person. You can't put a financial firm in jail."

Mr Bernanke told the newspaper that analysts were slow to realise the depth of the economic crisis and blamed himself for not explaining why it was in the public interest to rescue the financial firms that helped to cause the crisis.

The 61-year-old will release his new memoir, The Courage To Act: A Memoir Of A Crisis And Its Aftermath, on Monday, which details the scale of the crisis when the US government took over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and provided billions of dollars to aid big financial institutions.

In it, he writes that the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks and Wall Street firms was massively unpopular, but necessary to avoid economic meltdown.