The Ruination of our Nation

A majority of Republicans blame the 2008 meltdown on Obama who took office in 2009. Calendar reading not a forte in conservative circles.

Still, you might think after a year and 700 interviews, 10 smart people could give a straight answer on where $11 trillion went. America is not so lucky. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by President Obama in May, 2009, has completed it's report on the causes of the Great Recession of 2008. Verdict? America is so partisan today, it is impossible to get a straight answer on how every family in America lost an average of $120,000. What we got instead was three different reports split along political faultlines. A majority report by five Democrats and one independent, and two dissenting reports, one by three Republicans and one by Peter Wallison from the American Enterprise Institute.

The FCIC, a ten member commission appointed in 2009 was given $8 million to find out what caused the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. The commission spent a year and half looking into the housing bubble, the credit bubble, big Wall Street banks, government agencies, private mortgage brokers, derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and world credit markets. They compiled thousands of documents and conducted over 1,000 hours of interviews with people involved in the meltdown. What did they conclude was the reason for the financial mess that bankrupted entire countries?

That's hard to extract from the 600 page book they published mid-January 2011. The three conclusions give contradictory explanations of what happened, who was responsible and what, if anything, can be done to prevent the same thing from happening again. These reports can't all be true and we have a lot riding on figuring out what happened. Is the commission chair Phil Angelides right when he says specific policies, and actions taken or not taken by specific people were at fault and that the bubble could have been prevented? Are the three Republicans right when they say that "bubbles happen" and the only thing we can do is deregulate and let the market system do its thing? Or is Peter Wallison right when he says that the whole mess was only the result of government housing policies?

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