Ben Bernanke about the 2008 crisis and the risks of repeating

In the fall of 2008, the US economy spiraled into its worst recession since the Great Depression.

Years of lax lending standards helped inflate a credit bubble that burst, bringing down banks, seizing financial markets, and preventing even the healthiest companies from getting desperately-needed liquidity. Massive government bailouts and emergency stimulus programs followed, helping to stabilize the system. But only after many lost their jobs and well-beings.

Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke was on the front lines seven years ago as everything went down. No longer a policymaker, Bernanke is letting his hair down in his soon-to-be-released memoirs.

Bernanke spoke to USA Today about his time at the Fed during the financial crisis.

"Why didn’t anyone go to jail?" question to Bernanke . "Should somebody have gone to jail?"

“Yeah, I think so," he said.

Bernanke explained that the Fed did not have the authority to jail anyone. Rather, it was the Department of Justice's responsibility to do that. And while a few folks here and there went to prison for various violations, it's largely been the financial entities that have paid the penalties.

"A financial firm, of course, is a legal fiction," Bernanke explained. "It’s not a person. You can’t put a financial firm in jail."

"It would’ve been my preference to have more investigation of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm," he continued. "In that respect, there should’ve been more accountability at the individual level."

The concern is that without sufficient punishment at the individual level, there is little accountability. And with no precedent for such a punishment, we risk people.