On the heals of the news that Goldman Sachs nabbed nearly $3 billion from US taxpayers from bailed-out insurer American International Group as a payout on bets it placed on its own, not its clients’, account, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission points fingers at deregulation. Worse, it points out the very culture and infrastructure that allowed the crisis is alive and well today.
Phil Angelides
This financial crisis could have been avoided. Let us be clear: this calamity was a result of human action, inaction and misjudgment—not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and, importantly, failed to question, to understand and to manage the evolving risks in a financial system that’s so essential to the well-being of our country. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble.
John Thompson
The Federal Reserve was clearly the steward of lending standards in this country. They chose not to act. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York certainly could have reined in what was being done in some of the large money-center banks in New York. I mean, on and on and on, regulator after regulator, they either chose not to act or turned a blind eye to what was actually going on. So it’s less about a particular individual than a systematic sense of deregulation and inaction by those who were in power to take action.
Byron Georgiou
Our financial system is really not very different today in 2011 than it was in the run-up to this crisis in 2006 and 2007. In fact, the concentration of financial assets in the largest commercial and investment banks is really significantly higher today than it was in the run-up to the crisis, as a result of the evisceration of certain of the institutions and the consolidation and merger of others into larger institutions
