Rogue bankers should be jailed for using other people’s money in risky deals, Gordon Brown has said.
The former prime minister said more people should have been charged following the 2008 financial crash.
He added that failure to get tough on dishonest bankers including prison sentences, removal of bonuses and confiscation of assets would give the "green light" to further bad behaviour.
Mr Brown also revealed he had been prepared to quit if the multi-billion pound bank bail-out package failed to prevent a further collapse in the financial markets.
As prime minister at the time of the crash, and chancellor for a decade before that, Mr Brown acknowledged he would have had to resign if the intervention had failed on October 8 2008 and he told his wife Sarah to be ready to leave Downing Street.
In his memoir My Life, Our Times, Mr Brown warns "little has changed" since 2009 and the banks that were deemed "too big to fail" were now even larger.
Mr Brown said "it cannot be right" that disgraced former RBS boss Fred Goodwin "walked away with all of his past bonuses untouched" after the collapse of the bank.
He said under Mr Goodwin "millions of pounds were simply wasted" by RBS, with spending including a £200 million annual sponsorship budget and payments to sports stars to act as "global ambassadors" for the bank.
Mr Brown said that "at no point did I ever hear Fred Goodwin express real contrition to me - or to anyone else - for his role in the bank's collapse".
Reflecting on the lessons of the financial crash, Mr Brown said: "If bankers' conduct was dishonest by the ordinary standards of what is reasonable and honest, should there not have been prosecutions in the UK as we have seen in Ireland, Iceland, Spain and Portugal?"
Mr Brown suggested the Fraud Act should be used to tackle bankers who abuse their positions, make false representations or fail to disclose information.
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