And that’s just one stirring paragraph in the news release trumpeting the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ new report on the 2008 financial crisis.
The effort that went into producing the 600+ page report is staggering. If you think 600+ pages is light reading, then I have some good news for you – the subcommittee has made nearly 6,000 pages of supporting material available.
Even with this level of detail, the report concedes that it does not provide an examination of “every key moment” or “every important cause of the crisis.” The report does touch on everything from high risk lending at Washington Mutual Bank, to regulatory failure at the Office of Thrift Supervision, to inflated credit ratings at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, to investment bank abuses by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
At the top of the report you find two names – Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). It’s good to see the two teaming up. They have collaborated before to drag reckless behavior in the corridors of financial power into the sunshine of public scrutiny. See the 2006 Senate report on how out-of-control speculation on the London energy markets by British traders contributed to American (and global) economic woes for an example of this.
As is to be expected, this new report includes numerous recommendations on how to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Although many of the recommendations have been heard before – “Strengthen Disclosure”; “Ensure ‘Qualified Mortgages’ Are Low Risk; “Design Strong Conflict of Interest Prohibitions” for investment banks, etc – it doesn’t hurt to get them out in front of the public one more time.
Is there some sort of obscure law that says the various investigations into the global financial crisis’ roots have to release all of their findings, documentary evidence and research in a single day? This approach makes a big splash in the media, but carries the risk of overwhelming readers with so much information that no lasting impression is left.
Spooning out a bit of information at a time – an approach that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission experimented with – may make less of a media splash, but makes the subcommittee’s findings more digestible.
This approach will better serve the cause of alerting voters that, unless certain prudent changes are made to existing laws, it could all happen again.
