Mind Over Market

Remarks Made at a Book Party and Signing for Black Box Casino Event Hosted at 3101 Chain Bridge Road, Washington, D.C. 20016 November 10, 2011 By Robert Stowe England I’m here tonight to shine a spotlight on the causes of the financial crisis of 2008. If you are like me, when this crisis broke, you were shocked and outraged. Something had gone terribly wrong to deliver us into the world of Mad Max, where the norms vanished that we thought necessary to sustain our way of life. Financial institutions were crashing all around us while authorities seemed powerless to do anything about it. It was the worst financial crisis of modern times. As a journalist writing for Mortgage Banking magazine for more than 20 years, I covered the mortgage industry at the heart of the crisis. In January 2007, I found myself on the frontlines of the crisis reporting on a multitude of institutional and market failures than were just beginning to get underway. By August 2007, fully half the $11 trillion mortgag...

In a new brief released today, Peter J. Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute states that the Obama Administration's financial regulation plan -- as represented in Senator Christopher Dodd's bill -- 'raises the question of whether its purpose is actually to address the causes of the financial crisis or -- like ObamaCare -- to put the government in control of yet another sector of the U.S. economy." Wallison, who is the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at AEI, argues that the bill's provisions allowing for the Federal Reserve to regulate all large, nonbank financial institutions "would signal to the market that these institutions are too big to fail." The proposed $50 billion rescue fund to be administered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) enhances the too-big-to fail approach by assuring creditors "that they will be bailed out if one or more of these large institutions are in danger of failing," the br...