Showing posts with label retribution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retribution. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Crime and punishment

Congressman Michael E. Capuano does his job today, flaying the banks (htp: Jesse). I tried to email congratulations to him, but I haven't got a Massachusetts zip code.

And Karl Denninger also:

If the law enforcement agencies in this nation do not start prosecuting the fraudsters in our banking and investment industry that caused this economic collapse (and "token prosecutions" like Madoff will not cut it), and our lawmakers (and President) do not stand up darn soon and call for this prosecutorial action in public there is a very real risk that a repeat of those sordid affairs will soon arrive...
This much is clear to me - high-dollar white-collar crimes, certainly those with an impact greater in aggregate than we currently value a single human life (which various estimates put somewhere between $5 and $50 million each) are deserving of punishment equivalent to murder, meaning either (depending on state law) life imprisonment without possibility of parole or a sentence of death.
We need to put this change into the law as a deterrent against such acts in the future.

They're coming round to my point of view, as expressed e.g. here.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

In the news

Conservative leader David Cameron is making noises about prosecuting crooked bankers. Nice to see he's getting with my program.

Also in the Daily Mail, Alex Brummer says Madoff has queered the pitch for hedge funds generally. Damn: I had started to look at how to set one up, using links supplied by Jim from San Marcos. If I'd started a couple of years ago, I'd have got everyone into cash and made a packet for them and myself. 2 and 20, 2 and 20.

Odds on the bankers and hedgies Getting Away With It? Pretty fair, I'd have thought - especially when you bear in mind (as Denninger points out - and Jesse, too) all the others who could be implicated. To quote Oscar Wilde: "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."

Friday, November 21, 2008

Moral hazard and white-collar crime

I've said several times that I think a benchmark punishment for those financiers who have very nearly destroyed us with, if not criminal intent, then culpable ignorance, should be the repayment of their last 5 years' bonuses.

Harsh, one may think; unreasonable. Surely this would bankrupt many and leave them homeless.

Well, what is happening now to thousands of the victims of their greedy schemes across America and Britain? Men seeing the disappointment and cooling affection in their women's eyes, feeling the ardour of embraces replaced by demoralising reassurance, knowing that after the comfort comes recrimination; women worrying about their men's fidelity and sobriety, about their own security and the safety of their children; education disrupted, futures blighted.

A long-running motif in public affairs here and presumably across the Atlantic has been "getting away with it". You will all have your own list of those who have been rewarded for misbehaviour. Without fitting retribution, society will continue to crumble. This is not about vengeance, but about making whole.