UK Regulator To Bankers: If You Don’t Want Liability, Quit

The Governor of the Bank of England said directors and top executives should be made liable for reckless bank behavior, as a means of preventing future carelessness and potential financial disasters. The individuals heading up the banks whose dangerous risks ultimately threw the world into a recession in 2008 “got away,” Mark Carney said at the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting. “They got away with their compensation packages, they got away without sanction. … That has to change.” In a separate speech, Carney praised a proposal that global regulators will discuss at next month’s G20 Summit in Australia, which would put a minimum capital buffer for the biggest banks as a way to head off the need for taxpayer-funded bailouts.