Do you believe that the CEO of any company that fails should be jailed or just banks?
There was undoubtedly plenty of hubris, greed and incompetence to go round. I also believe that some of what occurred should, in hindsight, have been illegal. But having some sort of sacrifice to appease the gods is a little outdated.
Oh, and yes, all the CEOs were replaceable. Irreplaceability is a very silly argument.
That is the main issue. Nothing you can do against individuals that acted legally.
However hindsight happened very quickly, almost from day 1. There is no excuse that the bailouts didn't come with extremely punitive string attached only loosened after the law had been updated.
That did not happen. There is no moral to the story, no happy ending. Worse, hindsight works both ways. Maybe the current generation of financial company executives have learned their lesson, but the next one will have no such reserve.
We can punish them for actions deemed wrong even if legal. We do it to the poorest of criminals all the time, through creative legal maneuvers that judges have decided don't violate ex post facto. It is telling that we never do this for white collar crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
At a minimum they should have lost all their money and not walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sorry, but it's simply not that simple.
So prevention is the name of the game. But that requires competent regulators and oversight. Compliance and reporting laws, and so on. Investigators with staff and time, prosecutors willing to chase a case, and of course independent judges.
The SEC and DoJ could have tried to bring more charges, and they got billions in deferred prosecution agreements, maybe not enough though. (They - I mean DPAs - are not shiny like a jail time verdict, but they do work pretty well https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/soci-t-g-n-rale-sa-agrees-pay... see also https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsred... )
If we want to make up for the money lost by the innocent, then we can chose to tax those we think benefited. But that's completely different than blind vengeance.
Watch Silicon Valley scramble to adjust their moral compass if Tesla fails in the same manner.