Posted on 01/26/2011 5:40:39 AM PST by La Lydia
WASHINGTON — The 2008 financial crisis was an “avoidable” disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a federal inquiry. The commission that investigated the crisis casts a wide net of blame, faulting two administrations, the Federal Reserve and other regulators for permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors and risky bets on securities backed by the loans...
While the panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, accuses several financial institutions of greed, ineptitude or both, some of its gravest conclusions concern government failings...
The majority report finds fault with two Fed chairmen: Alan Greenspan, who led the central bank as the housing bubble expanded, and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, who did not foresee the crisis but played a crucial role in the response. It criticizes Mr. Greenspan for advocating deregulation and cites a “pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages” under his leadership as a “prime example” of negligence.
It also criticizes the Bush administration’s “inconsistent response” to the crisis — allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse in September 2008 after earlier bailing out another bank, Bear Stearns...
Democrats also come under fire. The decision in 2000 to shield the exotic financial instruments known as over-the-counter derivatives from regulation, made during the last year of President Bill Clinton’s term, is called “a key turning point ...
Timothy F. Geithner, who was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the crisis...was not unscathed; the report finds that the New York Fed missed signs of trouble at Citigroup and Lehman, though it did not have the main responsibility for overseeing them....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
the central problem was that short-term interest
rates were pushed to zero.
when ya take all the slack out of a rope, ya got nowhere to go
zero from zero equals ..
—
ap thread
Panel finds financial crisis was avoidable (Yes. Yes, You guessed it. Bush’s Fault! and others too).
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2664199/posts
Well DUH.
Excellent post. I am going to steal it for the logic impaired that still want to blame W.
>>I think the lion’s share of the “credit” for this mess belongs to Congress.
Congress deserves much of the blame - but it’s not congress who the Godfather of Subprime bought the ambassadorship to the Netherlands from.
>>it is still Bush’s fault.
Is it Bush’s fault that Penny Pritzker’s Chicago family Superior Bank failed in 2001 after its innovations in Subprime lending...
https://www.google.com/#q=pritzker+superior+bank+subprime
...or that Pritzker is the Secretary of Commerce, today?
>>The mortgage meltdown was caused by:
None of the points you regurgitate mention the fact that Sub-prime leader, Ameriquest/Argent Mortgage, wasn’t a bank, wasn’t under any regulatory supervision, and, as of May 2007 when their executives were still drooling over the possibility of their garbage being eligible for Freddy Fanny coverage sometime in the future... their loans weren’t eligible for coverage by Freddy / Fannie.
Who was the Godfather of Subprime and how did his organization game the system?
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