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Comment by 67726e | Hacker News Reader

Engineers can be held liable if something they designed catastrophically malfunctions. Maybe people responsible for the economic well-being of, well, the whole damned world should too?

People tend to think it's wrong that a corporation can play fast-and-loose with their money, and then fuck up royally get government bailouts and generally speaking keep on like nothing happened.

I honestly don't know enough about these institutions and relevant financial laws to know what, if anything, could be done as punishment/retribution/revenge but then again I don't feel like anything was done. Therein lies the problem, a group of people can sink the economy through risky/reckless practices and skip out of it while the common folk lose their jobs/homes/savings and that just feels wrong. At the very least, it feels like a lack of rule of law.

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> Maybe people responsible for the economic well-being of, well, the whole damned world

Do you honestly think your bank is responsible for your economic well-being? Or that bankers are responsible for every economically bad thing that happens?

Also: you don't feeeel that anything was done. So what? Feelings are misleading. Angsty teenagers often don't feeeel their parents love them, no matter how much they actually might. I didn't feeeel like getting up to go to work this morning, but I sucked it up and went anyway.

If our country were governed by feeeelings we'd in a deep, deep hole.

No, a bank is not responsible for my financial well being and I never made that assertion. In this case they more certainly are responsible for what happened.

And yes, Our country is governed by feelings and we are in a deep hole. If a member of the legislature feels we need a law for something, they will try to create one. They represent, or are at least supposed to, the collective interests (feelings) or their constituents.

And what is with the extra "e"s every time you spell "feel". I don't know if you intended it, but that most certainly reads to be very patronizing.

Engineers are held liable for failures after an investigation that uncovers say an undersized bolt that led to the failure, plus a showing of negligence on the part of the engineer for undersizing the bolt.

The causes of the financial collapse, on the other hand, are systemic and amorphous. Lots of things had to go wrong at the same time for it to happen. People selling mortgages were not checking to see if people could pay, people where buying houses they couldn't afford, Wall Street sold mortgage-backed securities knowing both of the above. If any of these groups had acted differently, the collapse wouldn't have happened. Why should bankers be the ones to get put in jail? Because we don't like them?

> mortgages were not checking to see if people could pay

> Wall Street sold mortgage-backed securities knowing both of the above

Sounds like negligence then?

Quite possibly, but that's a civil issue, not a criminal one.

Since everyone is guilty to some extent, and we let go free the financial "team", let's apply the same logic to borrowers. They could not foresee the crisys coming... Now let them keep the houses and erase debt records. Maybe this will make financial team more responsible for their actions in the round 2?

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