In his blog The Big Picture, Barry Ritholz posts part III of a series about what really happened in the financial crisis. This latest installment includes a mythbusting list from Jennifer S. Taub, Lecturer and Coordinator of the Business Law Program at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She quotes extensively from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, and it is a list well worth reading.
Here an excerpt from her list:
Myth #1: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission failed to come to any agreement, as the six Democratic appointees published a Report containing conclusions completely at odds with the views of the four Republican appointees.Reality #1: No. As Lawrence Baxter commented here, there is accord among nine of the 10 Commissioners on a variety of factors. Indeed, all 10 even agree on a precipitating cause of the crisis. As for the nine Commissioners, the centerpiece of the consensus is that poor risk management at US financial institutions was a chief contributor to the Crisis. As one such example, they all agree that insufficient capital and a reliance on short-term borrowing resulted from risk management failures at financial institutions.