“The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming, and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”
— Final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
The premature partisan sniping aside, it would be a grave mistake to dismiss the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s final report on what caused the tsunami-strength financial meltdown in late 2008 that came within a razor’s edge of dragging America, and the global economy, into a second Great Depression.
Americans who ignore this report, and who would thus allow Washington’s partisan Republican naysayers to reject regulatory reform to protect their Wall Street paymasters, would do so at their economic peril. This crisis, and aftermath that still afflicts the economy, were man-made, and preventable.
In fact, the report — a tome released Thursday as 576-page book after comprehensive research, 19 days of hearings and interviews with more than 700 witnesses — seems explicitly nonpartisan in where it lays blame, exhaustive in its scope, and definitively on-target with everything that has been learned since the crash occurred. It should become the bulwark for keeping and improving the financial regulation passed last year, not dismantling it.