In a Greenspanesque attempt to rehabilitate his reputation, Ben Bernanke is now saying that we should have jailed more (really any) bankers following the financial meltdown:

………

With publication of his memoir, The Courage to Act, on Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, “but 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.”

If he had said this in 2009, maybe some of the big name banksters would have seen the inside of a prison cell, and maybe the industry, and the Congress, would have made meaningful reforms to prevent a repeat of the orgy of fraud and greed that led to the last meltdown.

Too late, dude.