The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said that the Wall Street executives responsible to the financial meltdown crisis in 2008 and triggering the Great Recession should be put in jail.
"I think there was a reasonably good chance that, barring stabilization of the financial system, that we could have gone into a 1930s-style depression," Bernanke said, USA Today reported. "The panic that hit us was enormous - I think the worst in U.S. history."
The Justice Department now aims to implement the necessary action towards the financial firms, but Bernanke thinks something pro-active should be done. "It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm," Bernanke added.
However, Bernanke did not drop names in particular in relation to these allegations and emphasized that the Federal Reserve is not an agency under law enforcement. But he said he thinks that the "Leman Weekend," when the Lehman Brothers investment bank failed, was undeniably the worst part of the crisis, Fortune reported.
After retiring from the Federal Reserve in 2014, he began writing a memoir that talks about how the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while handing out aid toward financial companies in the United States. His 600-page book, to be released on Monday, is entitled "Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath," according to Nine MSN Finance.
