[quote=ucodegen]1) I think the OP is trolling in this case. The account name was created just to post this.
2) The referenced article is simplistic. Much more simplistic than a professor of Economics and Law should come up with. He took a something which had a surprisingly simple cure and spun it into a justification for something much more far reaching. The author also did not distinguish between regulation and the enforcement of existing regulation. There is a big difference between having regulation and not enforcing it versus not having the regulation in the first place.
The cause of the whole financial collapse of cards is actually fairly simple. Risk was not correctly priced when it came to mortgage loans. Why?
1) You had Congress tampering with risk pricing through Freddie and Fannie.
2) Credit Default Swaps, which are really insurance policies, are not regulated as such. Credit Default Swaps are the sacred cows of the banking industry because they allow almost unlimited leverage.
You can also expand this to include:
3) Lack of basic financial knowledge on the part of most of the populace.
4) Reduction in concepts of personal responsibility on the part of a large portion of the populace. (Entitlement generation).[/quote]
5) Alan Greenspan lowered rates and pegged them there for far too long, forcing everyone further out on the risk curve in order to obtain a decent yield.
6) Financial deregulation that enabled taxpayer-insured institutions (specifically “private” institutions with direct or indirect govt backing, that were able to gamble on their own behalf, using investors’/depositors’ money,) to create “financial innovations” that were specifically designed to misprice risk (yep, the derivatives you’ve mentioned, above), and leverage up, because they knew that the taxpayers would be forced to bail them out when the SHTF.
