Did those people do anything wrong or were they just essentially incompetent or not adequate for the job? Bonus clawbacks after government bailout are one thing but jailing people who probably didn't do anything criminal is a dangerous precedent.
If they are incompetent and they have consciously taken the positions they hold - then they are liable. Finance isn't "revolutionary" tech - there isn't much you can do that requires high risks and actually rewards you in the long run.
I would wonder what you'd say about a general who didn't know that using chemical warfare is a possible tribunal scenario.
We have a similar legal case in maritime law, where captains can be sued for anything that happens on their ships. If you can't take on that role and it's liability - then you shouldn't be the captain.
> Finance isn't "revolutionary" tech - there isn't much you can do that requires high risks and actually rewards you in the long run.
I don't think you read the article because it is based on a 700 page book about how it was revolutionary tech. It was just revolutionary finance tech. There was no ABCP before, there were no CDOs before, there were no central bank swaps before, there was no wholesale funding market, there were no offshore dollar banking market, etc.
It is hard to take seriously any arguments that the bankers were incompetent when you look at the sheer number of affected institutions -- you're left defending a claim that virtually every banker and most companies (look at the impacts on, say, Russian resource companies when they could no longer roll their dollar debt in wholesale funding markets in 2008) are incompetent. And that's always going to be difficult argument to make.
>> you're left defending a claim that virtually every banker and most companies
I don't need to defend that claim: most companies didn't care and neither they had enough resources to do their own, full due diligence into the state of America at the point of time. That's the job of the banks.
The fact that Russian companies held their debt in dollars has nothing to do with CDOs but rather their (false) belief in the stability of American economy.
