Topic: First They Jailed the Bankers, Now Every Icelander to Get Paid in Bank Sale (Read 545 times)

It´s a tiny place. There are a thousand Americans to an Icelander.

They would never have gotten away with not dealing with these people. But some of them have been and still are safe from Icelandic prosecutors in mob centers such as London and New York City and others.

Good example of how to goverm your country. Your people should be your first concern.
Also USA should hold up this as a good example. They should not let bankers to run the country.

Well, it´s only 5% of shares that they plan to distribute.

Frankly, I smell a rat which of course is a very natural reaction to politicians. I think it´s a sideshow to distract people and they´ll end up handing controlling ownership to friends, financial backers and cronies.

if the bank is in givernment hands now and selling it to pay the people 30,000 each ? then who ever buys it owns the bank

Good move by Iceland. This is why EU > US.

What they´re doing in the U.S. is setting a very important precedent for future crashes and lack of prosecution then. And they´re sending a message to the bankers to carry on with business as usual, can´t piss them off too much otherwise they might stop funding the marketing of the right politicians to voters. Crime usually pays when you own police, judge and jury. Well, maybe they fine you a cent on the dollar occasionally and eventually and maybe they even collect it sometimes....

Delamaide: Even Bernanke asks how bankers avoided jail

Darrell Delamaide, Special for USA TODAY 8:26 p.m. EDT October 6, 2015

WASHINGTON — Soft-spoken Ben Bernanke can still make the thunder roll.

The former Federal Reserve chairman acted boldly in 2008 as the U.S. slipped into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and dragged the rest of the world with it.

Now he is out with his memoir about it, The Courage to Act, and was still willing to make some bold statements in a video interview over the weekend with USA TODAY's Susan Page.

When asked why no big bank executives went to jail in spite of widespread fraud leading to the crisis, Bernanke said, "It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm."

The Fed is responsible for monetary policy and the prudential supervision of big banks, but as Bernanke noted is not a law-enforcement agency. The Department of Justice, which is, preferred to go after firms rather than individuals.

But a financial firm is a legal fiction, he said. "You can't put a financial firm in jail," Bernanke told Page. "There should have been more accountability at the individual level."

There you have it.

The official who many think is the second most powerful person in the country thought at the time and thinks now that there should have been investigation and prosecution of individual bank executives.

Bernanke said in plain language what President Obama, his first attorney general, Eric Holder, or his first Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, have been unwilling to say — bank executives should have been punished for their criminal actions.

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has made the lack of convictions in the wake of the crisis a theme of his campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and reiterated it again this week.

"It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near collapse of the economy," Sanders said in a statement. "The failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street for their illegal and reckless behavior is a clear indictment of our broken criminal justice system."

It is a message that clearly resonates with large crowds Sanders is drawing to his rallies. Over the weekend, he attracted more than 20,000 to the Boston Convention Center, double as many as the 10,000 Obama drew to the Boston Common in 2007.

The Department of Justice last month belatedly corrected its misguided policy on white-collar crime with a memo to federal prosecutors to put a new priority on bringing individuals to trial.

"Corporations can only commit crimes through flesh-and-blood people," Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, the author of the memo, said in a newspaper interview. "It's only fair that the people who are responsible for committing those crimes be held accountable. The public needs to have confidence that there is one system of justice and it applies equally regardless of whether that crime occurs on a street corner or in a boardroom."

Bill Black, a former financial regulator and prominent Wall Street critic, said the DOJ "is tacitly admitting that its experiment in refusing to prosecute the senior bankers that led the fraud epidemics that caused our economic crisis failed."

Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, continued in a blog post: "The result was the death of accountability, of justice, and of deterrence. The result was a wave of recidivism in which elite bankers continued to defraud the public after promising to cease their crimes."

But this critic was not impressed by the DOJ's latest move, which comes conveniently after the statute of limitations has run out for frauds committed in the run-up to the 2008 crisis.

"This is the latest in the series of smokescreens that so far haven't led to any change," he told radio journalist RJ Eskow.

Black cited DOJ's failure to prosecute any individual executive at General Motors for the coverup of a faulty ignition switch implicated in at least a hundred deaths.

He also noted that Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Holder as attorney general, declined to prosecute any individuals at HSBC when she was U.S. attorney in New York despite massive evidence of illegal money laundering by the bank.

So don't hold your breath that Lynch's Justice Department will take any more forceful action on white-collar crime than it did under Holder.

Besides, as everyone from Ben Bernanke on down knows, it's too late to punish a generation of Wall Street bankers whose lesson from the financial crisis was that crime, indeed, does pay.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2015/10/06/delamaide-bernanke-bankers-jail-comments/73459416/

We just need to make our bankers Honorary Citizens of Iceland.

It´s better than nothing. And it´s per head from age one to 105.

Also the govt. holds most of another bank, the largest in the country. A similar share of that one could yield 3X as much. It´s basically a dividend of sorts. The population  obviously owns the whole thing through the government.

Icelenders did very good job,world should follow them

30,000 is really only 232 USD. Considering the high cost of living in iceland, that wouldnt even pay for a month's rent  .

We just have to see the amount of money spent by US Financial institutions in lobbying and political donations.
That will tell us if America can afford to jail its bankers. 

Iceland continues to do the opposite of what U.S. does - with excellent results.

Claire Bernish
October 29, 2015
(ANTIMEDIA) Iceland — First, Iceland jailed its crooked bankers for their direct involvement in the financial crisis of 2008. Now, every Icelander will receive a payout for the sale of one of its three largest banks, Íslandsbanki.
If Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson has his way — and he likely will — Icelanders will be paid kr 30,000 after the government takes over ownership of the bank. Íslandsbanki would be second of the three largest banks under State proprietorship.
“I am saying that the government take some decided portion, 5%, and simply hand it over to the people of this country,” he stated.
Because Icelanders took control of their government, they effectively own the banks. Benediktsson believes this will bring foreign capital into the country and ultimately fuel the economy — which, incidentally, remains the only European nation to recover fully from the 2008 crisis. Iceland even managed to pay its outstanding debt to the IMF in full — in advance of the due date.
Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson, Budget Committee vice chairperson, explained the move would facilitate the lifting of capital controls, though he wasn’t convinced State ownership would be the ideal solution. Former Finance Minister Steingrímur J. Sigfússon sided with Þórðarson, telling a radio show, “we shouldn’t lose the banks to the hands of fools” and that Iceland would benefit from a shift in focus to separate “commercial banking from investment banking.”
Plans haven’t yet been firmly set for when the takeover and subsequent payments to every person in the country will occur, but Iceland’s revolutionary approach to dealing with the international financial meltdown of 2008 certainly deserves every bit of the attention it’s garnered.
Iceland recently jailed its 26th banker — with 74 years of prison time amongst them — for causing the financial chaos. Meanwhile, U.S. banking criminals were rewarded for their fraud and market manipulation with an enormous bailout at the taxpayer’s expense.

http://theantimedia.org/first-they-jailed-the-bankers-now-every-icelander-to-get-paid-in-bank-sale/