Bernanke: Executives should have faced jail for 2008 crisis

Former US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has said more executives rather than big firms should have been investigated for their roles in the 2008 financial crisis.

Many of the world’s biggest lenders have been fined heavily for their involvement in global crash.

But few high-level executives have so far faced charges.

Mr Bernanke said “everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm”.

But he said a financial firm was a legal fiction, not a person, and that “you can’t put a firm in jail”.

Better communication

In his interview with USA Today ahead of this week’s publication of his memoirThe Courage to Act, the former chairman of the central bank also said the Fed could have done more to communicate its decisions more clearly with the public at the time.

He added that he could personally have done more to explain why such enormous rescue efforts were being conducted to rescue the financial firms who helped create the financial crisis.

“Every time I saw a bumper sticker which said, ‘Where’s my bailout?’ it hurt,” he said.

Mr Bernanke also explained that the Fed was not empowered to conduct investigations into firms or individuals.

“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.”

Mr Bernanke served as chairman of the Fed for two terms, having been first appointed by former US President George W Bush in 2006