REAL-LIFE criminals bear little resemblance to those seen in films. On screen, the bad guys effortlessly tunnel beneath banks or casinos, hack into their security systems and escape using elaborate feints that baffle the police. In real life criminals tend not to be so well organised—consider the hapless bank robber who had little success with his note demanding cash and threatening to set off a bomb. In fiction, financial villains effortlessly manipulate markets and move billions around the world in seconds. In real life the bankers who tried to rig LIBOR, an important interest rate, were such bunglers that one discussed plans on a public chat forum until a manager sent him a private note saying “BE CAREFUL DUDE”. His reply? “I agree we shouldnt ve been talking about putting fixings for our positions on public chat” [sic]. So why, one might legitimately ask, have so few bankers gone to jail for their part in the financial crisis? It is now almost five years since the world’s financial system was brought to its knees and had to be bailed out by taxpayers at a cost of billions. Millions of people lost their jobs or suffered from lower living standards because of the recession brought on by the financial collapse. Yet almost no bankers have faced legal sanctions for their part in precipitating the crisis. In Britain, which had to bail out three of its biggest banks, not one senior banker has gone on trial over the failure of a bank. In America there have been just a handful of criminal charges brought against senior executives of banks, and even fewer successful convictions. This is very different from the response of prosecutors in earlier banking crises, such as the meltdown of Savings & Loans institutions in America in the 1980s. In that case more than 1,000 bankers were convicted for their misdeeds. Admittedly, bankers have been put on trial in some countries. German prosecutors have charged several bank executives whose banks failed, and in Brazil, bank directors can be held personally liable for the losses incurred by their banks. But the numbers involved are tiny.

One reason so few bankers have been jailed is that it has proved difficult for prosecutors to connect wrongdoing low down in a large financial organisation—submitting false LIBOR estimates, say—to senior executives running the bank. Although the bosses may create or perpetuate a culture in which those lower down the ranks feel entitled or expected to abandon morality, there is seldom a chain of e-mails or other direct instructions that actually advocates wrongdoing. A second reason for the paucity of prosecutions is that in capitalist societies where risk-taking is seen as a necessary part of business, it is not actually illegal to run a bank, or any other company, into the ground.

Public outrage is, however, prompting some countries to think again about imposing stricter rules that might make it easier to jail bankers. Britain is considering criminal sanctions for reckless management, as well as a rule that would bar the managers of failed banks from running other companies unless they could prove they were not at fault. Yet stricter liability has its drawbacks. Countries such as the United Arab Emirates that penalise bankruptcy and even threaten debtors with prison are not known for their vibrant start-up cultures. Discouraging risk-taking altogether, in short, can be counterproductive. Rather than spending their time looking for new ways to punish bankers, policymakers would do better to find ways to avoid having to bail out banks out in the first place.

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