The bigger question is who are the criminals? You can't throw the building in jail, and just because a negative emergent behavior manifested doesn't mean any one person had to have taken an action rising to the level of criminal culpability.
If that is true (and I think it is) I would argue the law is wrong. It should absolutely be the case that senior executives have criminal liability for criminal behaviours that emerge under their stewardship whether or not they personally contributed to them. Either they knew about it in which case they're complicit or they didn't in which case they're negligent. The risk of criminal liability is also the only possible justification for the high current level of CEO pay relative to average salaries at most big name companies.
I think some care should be taken in being too reductive here. If a CEO oversees just 50 people (maybe companies should be capped at smaller sizes?) then there will be at least a 50:1 information reduction even if they spend all their working hours in 100% efficient information transfer. Moreover, in many cases I would expect the bulk of that missing information to be the more negative aspects of the business -- who wants to look bad to their superiors?
Adding to that, defaults matter. If by default a CEO is culpable then it's suddenly possible to force them into jail by simply joining as a malicious employee.
> The risk of criminal liability is also the only possible justification for the high current level of CEO pay relative to average salaries at most big name companies.
Not necessarily (I think the idea is that they're paid a lot because they bring in proportionally more profits/cashflow/etc?), but I agree it's a little fishy that a CEO can take credit for large gains and be handed a golden parachute when a company's fraud sees the light of day.
I'm curious as to why you think the state taking over temporarily would have positive effects. Would you mind elaborating?
Who is the victim when banks steal from millions of people?