The failure of the Fed, the failure of Greenspan and Bernanke, the failure of the regulatory apparatus, the failure of so-called free markets, the failure of political leaders, the failure of credit agencies, take your pick, they were all failures, they were entirely avoidable, and no one involved in this litany of failure has paid any price at all (while 25 million Americans were made unemployed and several million lost their homes), according to the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission:
“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?”
Gorilla says: “And we learned nothing at all about breaking up the banks, and the failure Bernanke was reappointed, so the prospects for avoidable failure remain as strong as ever!”
