it's more like because governments have started to try to assign criminal liability to seniormost execs, not just to the people responsible. this is a response to the wink-and-nod cases that do exist but glaringly fails to account for the complexity and scope of large financial institutions and the fact that the guy at the top can't always supervise everything personally.
i don't know who you're talking to but no, it's not that criminal. it may be "corrupt" in the sense of rent-seeking or recapture-heavy institutions. it may be "corrupt" in the sense that your average IB analyst knows he's pulling long hours to churn out reams of 80% BS. it may be "corrupt" in that the VP at a PE fund knows that 7 turns of leverage and an inflated multiple for this middle-market shitco isn't actually a good buy. but there are a lot of honest people, enough that you can choose to do business with the same.
> it's more like because governments have started to try to assign criminal liability to seniormost execs, not just to the people responsible.
seniormost execs exist to be the people who are responsible. They get the big bucks because they're supposed to be accountable for everything that goes on under their watch.
If they don't want the liability, or can't actually supervise sufficiently to prevent crime, then they shouldn't accept the job. If they want to take the paychecks and golden parachutes, they can also take the prison sentences.
BS. they exist to accept some level of responsibility but it's impossible to make them anything except scapegoats in orgs of a certain scale. if you disagree, you are either misinformed or simply hate them and want an excuse to jail them.
do you know how many managing directors JPMC has? this is just one bank and we're talking about a very senior position, half-a-million-a-year base salary sort of seinor. they have around 1,600. it is impossible for one person to manually oversee even what's a pretty high-level position with many direct and indirect reports. impossible to manage this without trusting subordinates.
it sounds like you are motivated more by schadenfreude or malice towards these people because of "paychecks and golden parachutes". this isn't a good-faith position or a reasonable policy.
top executives are responsible when the company makes a profit. maybe they should be responsible when the company commits a crime. if they can't be responsible when the company commits a crime, how do they justify being primarily responsible when the company does well?
they are responsible when a company makes a profit or a loss. that's a pretty fair trade-off. the core difference is you can't attribute a profit or loss solely to one person, not hardly ever. you can, however, attribute criminal activity to a certain number of people, because it's very tightly defined. you can't just calculate the EV of every action the same way.
i don't know who you're talking to but no, it's not that criminal. it may be "corrupt" in the sense of rent-seeking or recapture-heavy institutions. it may be "corrupt" in the sense that your average IB analyst knows he's pulling long hours to churn out reams of 80% BS. it may be "corrupt" in that the VP at a PE fund knows that 7 turns of leverage and an inflated multiple for this middle-market shitco isn't actually a good buy. but there are a lot of honest people, enough that you can choose to do business with the same.