Blind justice

CRIME sometimes pays unusual social dividends. In 2010 São Paulo’s museum of modern art hosted an exhibition of works that had been seized from a variety of crooks and drug traffickers. Some of the art had belonged to the founder of a Brazilian bank, Banco Santos, that had collapsed in 2005. After the bank’s liquidation Edemar Cid Ferreira lost his art collection and his home, was convicted of “crimes against the national financial system” and money-laundering, and sentenced to 21 years in jail.

For better or worse, many people would love to see more bankers behind bars for their role in blowing up the West’s financial system. In Britain not one senior banker has faced criminal charges relating to the failure of his institution. A handful have faced the lesser sanction of being barred from running another bank or company, or agreeing in settlements with regulators not to do so. (Policymakers have proposed introducing a “rebuttable presumption” that the directors of a failed bank should be automatically barred from running another unless they could prove they weren’t at fault.)