How Best to Punish a Banker

Never mind John Thain being shamed into forking over $1.2 million of his own cash to cover the cost of some fairly lavish remodeling he ordered up during his short tenure at the helm of Merrill Lynch.

In England, they really know how to hurt a guy. Former deputy prime minister John Prescott, for example, has called for the Queen to strip Sir Fred Goodwin, the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive, of his knighthood.

"The bankers caused the problems and they should be paying the consequences for it," Prescott said, according to the Evening News in Edinburgh.

Sir Fred received the honor for his "services to banking," Prescott argues, but those services now appear to consist primarily of running the bank into the ground.

Lest you dismiss Prescott's gambit as nothing more than off-the-cuff bluster from a politician notorious for being impolitic, consider that two others, Tavish Scott of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and Christine Grahame of the Scottish National Party, have called on police to open an inquiry into Sir Fred's upbeat comments as he promoted a rights offering that has proven to be a disaster for shareholders.

by Mark Stein