Bernanke: More Bankers Should Be in Jail

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said he believes more Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, according to a USA Today interview. The former chairman was promoting the release of his memoir, The Courage to Act, which profiles the central bank’s response to the meltdown. Bernanke said he believed more bankers weren’t in jail because the Department of Justice decided to prosecute financial institutions rather than individuals. “You can’t put a financial firm in jail,” he said. “It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.”