TW: Floyd Norris (NYT) is one of the best at cutting through the financial BS. His brief take on how we ended up with Bear, Lehman and Merrill all going down (at least). We have had three massive credit crises (the Depression 1929, the S&L debacle 1990, now this one), they all occured after a multi-term Republican Administration.
"1) The capital rules were far too lax, and they still are..
3) Those who were complaining, only months ago, that excessive regulation was making American markets uncompetitive, had it exactly wrong. It was a lack of regulation of the shadow financial system and its players that allowed this to happen. The regulators might not have gotten it right if they had tried to put limits on leverage, or assure that it was clear what risks were being taken, in the world of derivatives and securitizations. But deciding not to even try, and assuming that risks traded secretly would somehow end up in the hands of those most able to bear them, reflected ideology, not analysis
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/and-then-there-were-two/
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