The Totally BS FCIC Commission Report and Dissents, Which Put All Together Actually Reveal Something
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission came out with its report—and two dissents!
Lots to read! Lots of BS to wade through! Lots of finger pointing! Lots of skewed analysis that justify a political agenda!
Whoo-hoo!
Actually, cynical glee is the only emotion that keeps major depression at bay: The FCIC was set up in May of 2009, with the goal of getting to the root causes of the Global Financial Crisis, and find what policies and which actors were responsible for the melt-down. In a very real sense, the FCIC was supposed to be the modern day version of the Pecora Commission—
—but it wasn’t. Not by a country mile.
The bipartisan Commission members cleaved along party lines: The six members of the Democratic majority wrote the report, the four Republican minority members wrote two separate dissents.
The official report of the Commission—the one written by the six Democrats—starts by saying that the financial meltdown of 2008 was avoidable—which is trivially true: Every man-made event is “avoidable”.
Then the report squarely blames the Federal Reserve for abdicating its regulatory responsibility—which is very true: The Fed under Greenspan made it practically a point of honor to leave all the financial markets alone, and let them “innovate” as they saw fit, without vetting whether the “innovations”—like credit default swaps, mortgage bonds, and so on—were dangerous or not. Warren Buffett famously called default swaps the “financial weapons of mass destruction”—before the crisis. So Greenspan should have known better.
Then the Commission report goes after the banksters—which is also accurate, as their greed and recklessness certainly contributed to the crisis. Certainly their mismanagement of risk—not to mention their completely opaque balance sheets—created the conditions for crisis.
But the Commission report blames the banksters on moral grounds—it says nothing about how bankers have no skin in the game, as it were. They are employees of a corporation, not partners in a concern. Consider private European banks, that never put themselves at the level of risk that American corporate banks did. The Commission report doesn’t seem to understand the idea of OPM, and how banksters were the ultimate players in that game.
As to the government, the only criticism leveled by the Commission report is after the fact: The “inconsistent response [of the Federal government] added to the uncertainty and panic of the markets”. This, of course, is a reference to the Bush administration’s salvaging of Bear Stearns, yet then letting Lehman Brothers—a much larger, more important firm—sink.
The sense that comes off the report from the Democratic majority is that the Federal government did nothing wrong—except when it was being run by Republicans, such as the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury during the Hank Paulson/George W. Bush administration. Then, of course, they fucked up royally.
So although the Commission report highlights true causes of the financial crisis, one cannot take it seriously: It is so politically skewed—and so unwilling to look at long term, Great Society, New Deal government policies that directly led to systemic problems in the financial markets—that it torpedoes its own credibility.
At least the report can be taken semi-seriously: The first dissent, written by three of the Republican members—Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Bill Thomas—is the most incompetent and irresponsible of the three written statements released by the Commission. It’s more of a joke than a dissent.
The three dissenters portentously claim they have identified “Ten Essential Causes of the Financial Crisis”: But what they actually do is simply enumerate a series of symptoms of the crisis. As anyone knows, symptoms aren’t causes.
Their number one “Essential Cause” is that “Starting in the late 1990’s, China, other large developing countries, and the big oil-producing nations built up large capital surpluses. They loaned these savings to the United States and Europe, causing interest rates to fall.”
This of course is BS—and BS that everyone knows: Interest rates were low starting in 1992 because Easy Al—that is, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan—kept them low, goosing along the American economy whenever it threatened to slow down. This directly led to “irrational exuberance”, and a series of bubbles during the 1990’s and 2000’s. The only bubble Chinese and foreign money blew was in Treasury bonds. The tech bubble, Internet 1.0 bubble, housing bubble? All the Fed.
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