Rooting out the cause of the crisis

David Frum is doing a great series on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report. The report is, obviously, US-centric but its argument that the problem was not with the regulation but the regulators strikes me as highly important:

“[W]e do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it. To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not. Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not. In case after case after case, regulators continued to rate the institutions they oversaw as safe and sound even in the face of mounting troubles, often downgrading them just before their collapse. And where regulators lacked authority, they could have sought it.”

One other thing worth noting is just how dramatic the explosion in pay in the financial sector was.