Can We Ever Punish the Powerful?

Powerful executives and public figures often face surprisingly few consequences from actions that can cost companies billions of dollars and thousands of employees their jobs. One study of directors found that people who had served on the boards of banks that required government assistance during the financial crisis confronted turnover imperceptibly higher than peers who had served on banks that had weathered the financial storm in better shape. New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin detailed the many directors who maintained their positions even after presiding over financial disasters—Stan O’Neal, former CEO of Merrill Lynch who was on the board of Alcoa; Charles Prince of Citigroup, who was on the boards of Xerox and Johnson and Johnson; and James Johnson, the former chief executive of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae, who remained on the boards of Target and Goldman Sachs.