Most of you will have seen Ben Bernanke’s recent crocodile tears regarding how he wished more individuals were held responsible, for you know, destroying the American middle class and handing over the nation to a handful of criminal oligarchs.

As David Dayen notes, he is completely full of shit. As usual.

From the Intercept:

Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke joined practically everyone in America by saying in his new memoir, The Courage to Act, that more Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for criminal misconduct that led to the financial crisis.

“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,” he wrote.

Unlike practically everyone else in America, however, Bernanke was in a pretty good position to actually facilitate criminal misconduct proceedings, if he wanted to see them so badly — as  head of the nation’s most powerful bank supervisory agency from 2006 to 2014.

The Fed, like all banking regulators, can initiate criminal referrals to the Justice Department for individuals they find to have broken the law. This acts as the first line of defense to discipline criminal misconduct on Wall Street.

But such activities were absent during the period when Bernanke was chair, according to criminologist and law professor Bill Black. “The Federal Reserve appears to have made zero criminal referrals; it made three about discrimination,” Black told Bill Moyers in 2013.

This is just an excerpt, I suggest reading the entire article.

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