To justify taking away someone's bonuses, you still have to accuse them of some sort of wrongdoing and malfeasance, and then prove it.
The barrier is lower (preponderance of evidence vs. no reasonable doubt), but the same basic question remains: what do you charge them with, and can you prove it? Note that bonus clawbacks were instituted at many banks after the crisis, but they weren't in place before then.
I just want to note that many bankers did lose their jobs and their life savings in the crisis themselves. A lot of bankers had much of their savings (unwisely) in their own company stock. Everyone at Bear, Lehman, MF Financial, and a bunch of other places found themselves out of a job and often out of much of their wealth at the same time. Most of these weren't people greedily rubbing two coins together while thinking of how to screw the American people -- they were people who deluded themselves and thought their money machines stable and impregnable and never thought they would blow up.
You haven't heard of "Civil Asset Forfeiture" ? Where's the "due process" there??
The anger about the lack of prosecutions for bankers, at least in part, is the frustration that comes from realizing things aren’t right in the U.S. The justice system works very differently for the 1% than for everyone else. I think with growing inequality comes growing anger and resentment.
The thing is, it's very much not clear that they did anything actually illegal. In that sense, not throwing them in gaol for not violating the law is exactly how the justice system is supposed to work, for the rich and the poor alike.
I don’t recall the two year minimum. I wonder if it’s changed or my memory is just faulty (again).
the government CHOSE to bail it all out, and they will probably be doing something similar one day for Uber, Bitcoin and maybe even Tesla.
we have CHOSEN the bubble/bailout cycle
To blow up the global banking system, you need a cascading set of bets that goes bad and creates orders of magnitude more counterparty risk than retail lending could possibly create.
"Randomly selected"? Not sure what you mean by that. We know which companies acted in shady ways.
I mean sure, there was no way to trace wrongdoings to specific individuals. But that's OK. C-level executives make tens of millions of dollars every year. In return, they must carry the burden of responsibility when their underlings do shady shit. Gotta earn all that money, you know?
More broadly, it's wrong to punish people for wrongdoing that they did not commit. That kind of thing should not happen in a free society.