Now, it’s certainly true that when you look at the
country’s biggest banks, trading and speculation have become an
ever-bigger part of their business. But the financial crisis was not the
product of too much trading or too little disclosure. It was the
product of a massive credit bubble, during which banks all across the
country, and investors all across the world, handed out trillions of
dollars in loans on massively overvalued assets, much of it to people
who were unlikely to ever be able to pay them back. This bubble was
certainly exacerbated by the spread of securitization, which created the
illusion that risk was diversified and made it easier for lenders to
hide the sheer crappiness of the loans they were making, and
credit-default swaps, which allowed banks to delude themselves that they
were insured against risk. But the fundamental source of the crisis,
and of the banks’ troubles, was the orgy of irresponsible lending. And
while uncertainty did help fuel panic in the fall of 2008, even if banks
had been as transparent as possible, there would still have been a
panic. Indeed, given the disastrous state of bank balance sheets then,
honesty might have made people more panicked, not less.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/the-real-problem-with-the-big-banks.html#ixzz2MA50Htry
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