Professor William Black:

Some of this occurs but vastly less than people think. Let us talk about it. One thing is that compensation is often paid in shares. Those concerned say, "Look, how much I lost when the bank failed", because the share price fell. However, the share price was never real. The only reason the share price reached those kinds of numbers was precisely because of the strategies of the recipe. Therefore, they never lost money because it was not there. Also, even the bankers who are running these schemes do not know when the bubble is going to end; nobody knows. Sometimes people stay too long in the game but frequently, even in those circumstances, you will find it was not really their money but the banks' money. I would be far less impressed with the line of logic that states those concerned must not have been doing anything deliberately wrong because they, too, suffered some losses in these circumstances. That does not follow logically.