The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Final Report
……came out yesterday. Klein gives the crux of the findings:
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has released its final report, which looks to “determine what happened and how it happened so that we could understand why it happened.” The full document — including the dissents from four of the Republicans on the panel — can be downloaded here. The transcripts of the hearings the committee conducted can be found here. If the thousands of pages in those two links seem like a bit much to you, the FCIC’s conclusions are here (pdf). This, I think, is the key takeaway:
We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble. While the business cycle cannot be repealed, a crisis of this magnitude need not have occurred. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.
Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. The tragedy was that they were ignored or discounted. There was an explosion in risky subprime lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner.
The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the low of toxic mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not. The record of our examination is replete with evidence of other failures: Financial institutions made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care to examine, or knew to be defective; firms depended on tens of billions of dollars of borrowing that had to be renewed each and every night, secured by subprime mortgage securities; and major firms and investors blindly relied on credit rating agencies as their arbiters of risk. What else could one expect on a highway where there were neither speed limits nor neatly painted lines?
We have the full doc up on Scribd. Unfortunately, Tumblr is jacked up right now, we can’t do direct coding and put it on the post as we usually do. Once it’s back to normal, we’ll add. It’s a beast. 700+ pgs. But they 19 days of hearings, thousands of pages of subpoena’d docs. Remarkable effort. Worth your time to at least glance over.
#GREATMOMENTSINBANKINGHISTORY #theyarewhowethoughttheywere #50hotones #godswork
