One of our Daily Reads this morning is a piece by John Carney on the prosecution of Lehman executives. My immediate thought when I started reading is exactly what Carney reaches as a conclusion: it doesn’t matter whether there is any justice to a prosecution of Dick Fuld, because the government can and will aggressively punish failure. That’s what happened to Mike Milken and Martha Stewart, who didn’t deserve what they got, as well as Ivan Boesky and Jeff Skilling, who did.

I don’t entirely buy that Lehman’s stock would have been lower if the… well, the improprieties potentially bordering on fraud were widely known. Fuld was an a-hole who dissed everyone on the street, as well as common sense. He had a target on his back even before Bear fell, and afterward the talk was immediately about LEH. If Fuld had reached out and lined up outside capital or a strategic partner as late as the summer of 08, he might have survived. But he was too hardheaded to let himself get boned, which is what would have to have happened.