Tony Blair, senior adviser to JP Morgan and former British prime minister, felt it necessary to defend his current and former employers:

We must not start thinking that society will be better off “if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street”, Mr Blair says.

This comes just days after noted economist Nouriel Roubini suggested that in fact hanging bankers is exactly what we need to do.

Personally I think they are both right: we are gonna need to hang a lot more than just 20 bankers.

Professor Michael Hudson explained several years ago that bankers are indeed trying to reset the clock back to feudal days.

The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

The financial elite want unlimited power over their fellow man and the ability to seize ALL of his wealth, without cause and without consequences. Our corrupt political elites want to be able to operate above the law and get rich in the process.
Both groups are looking back to feudal days as their ultimate objective.

However, a reading of history would show them that this objective would not only be temporary, but it could cost them their heads.

The history of drastic punishment for financial crimes may be nearly as old as wealth itself.

The Code of Hammurabi, more than 3,700 years ago, stipulated that any Mesopotamian who violated the terms of a financial contract – including the futures contracts that were commonly used in commodities trading in Babylon – “shall be put to death as a thief.” The severe penalty doesn’t seem to have eradicated such cheating, however.

In medieval Catalonia, a banker who went bust wasn’t merely humiliated by town criers who declaimed his failure in public squares throughout the land; he had to live on nothing but bread and water until he paid off his depositors in full. If, after a year, he was unable to repay, he would be executed – as in the case of banker Francesch Castello, who was beheaded in 1360. Bankers who lied about their books could also be subject to the death penalty.

In Florence during the Renaissance, the Arte del Cambio – the guild of mercantile money-changers who facilitated the city’s international trade – made the cheating of clients punishable by torture. Rule 70 of the guild’s statutes stipulated that any member caught in unethical conduct could be disciplined on the rack “or other corrective instruments” at the headquarters of the guild.

Counterfieting and forgery in Renaissance Florence was much less prevelant than in 20th Century Florence.
In England, counterfeiting was punishable by death.

What really put this all into perspective was a recent Bloomberg article. It reveals when it comes to thievery and abuse of power, nothing much changes unless the people rise up and stop it.

The Great Rising of 1381

The most important factor for the Peasant Revolt was the imposition of a third poll tax in four years. The Statute of Labourers, which suppressed both wages and the movement of labor, was another contributing factor.
But what was mostly forgotten was the lingering resentment from financial abuses by wealthy financiers and their ability to avoid punishment.

A major aim of financial innovation throughout history has been to circumvent regulations and restrictions placed on the industry. In the Middle Ages, an important obstacle was the religious disapproval of usury -- the charging of interest or “making money from money.” Dante condemned the usurer to the lowest level of the seventh circle of Hell. To avoid the “taint of usury,” medieval financiers developed various methods of disguising interest within other transactions....
Perhaps the most sophisticated method of disguising usury involved foreign-exchange transactions. The pound sterling, for example, was always valued higher in Venice than in London. These differentials (or spreads) enabled bankers to profit by moving money from one place to another and back.
To produce and maintain these spreads, however, required systematic “rigging” of exchange rates across Europe. In essence, banks and currency brokers in London always had to deduct a few pence from the rate with Venice, and their counterparts in Venice had to add a few pence.

This market rigging is not that much different from the LIBOR rigging that the banks do today.
Like today, a few, rare politicians were outraged by the banker's theft and demanded punishment.

During the “Good Parliament” of 1376, public discontent over such perceived financial abuses came to a head. The Commons, represented by the speaker, Peter de la Mare, accused leading members of the royal court of abusing their position to profit from public funds.
A particular target was the London financier Richard Lyons, an immigrant from Flanders who had risen to become one of the wealthiest and most influential citizens, partly through his own talents as a merchant but also by capitalizing on his personal connections to members of the court. Among other crimes, Lyons was suspected of imposing an unauthorized tax on foreign- exchange transactions and overcharging the king for loans. On one occasion, he and William Lord Latimer were said to have arranged a loan of 20,000 marks for the king but charged him 30,000 marks, a usurious rate of interest.
Initially the government bowed to public pressure. Lyons was imprisoned in the Tower of London and his properties and wealth were confiscated. Other leading courtiers implicated in these abuses, such as Latimer and the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, were banished from court.

However, once the parliment was dissolved, the public pressure died down.
Latimer and Perrers were allowed back to court, Lyons was released from prison and his wealth was restored to him. Meanwhile, the "whistleblower", de la Mare, was thrown in jail - a very similar threatment of whistleblowers today .

England had gone back to business as usual, and Lyon had gotten away with his financial crimes with the help of corrupt politicians...until the Peasant Revolt a few years later.

simmering discontent over continuing suspicions of government corruption and the poll tax contributed to a massive popular uprising, the Peasants’ Revolt, during which leading government ministers, including Simon of Sudbury (the chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury) and Robert Hales (the treasurer) were executed by the rebels. This time, Lyons did not escape; he was singled out, dragged from his house and beheaded in the street.

Unfotunately, the Peasant Revolt of 1381 failed just like every other peasant revolt, mostly because the peasants are almost never as ruthless as the elites.
But it is interesting to see politicians protecting thieves in the financial industry century after century, and that the practice will continue without consequences until the peasants revolt again.