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Engineering the Financial Crisis

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Submitted By dmarkham28
Words 2722
Pages 11
Dan Markham
4/3/2012
Economic and Public Policy Issues
Paper Assignment –Book Review

Too Big to Function: The Absurdity of Market Regulation

There are many theories as to what was the underlying cause of the Great
Recession from which America is still recovering. Popular ideas generally include irrational exuberance on the part of commercial banks, executive compensation packages which encouraged bankers to over-leverage themselves, and the collapse of the sub-prime housing market. While it is probable that some of these factors played a role in the crisis, none of them can accurately explain the near complete collapse of the financial system that began in late 2007. In fact, the cause of the financial crisis can be directly traced to the failure of government regulators to recognize the dangers of interactions between several different laws designed to protect the system.

In their book entitled Engineering the Financial Crisis, authors Jeffery Friedman and Wladimir Kraus lay out an argument asserting that the crisis was caused by an unforeseen interaction between capital requirements for banks and the use of Mark to
Market accounting methods. They further contend that there was a “master regulatory mistake that precipitated the crisis: using the bond ratings produced by Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch as the determinant of the capital levels required of banks by law” (Friedman
148). The book contains four chapters; the first is devoted to the refutation of several prevailing theories as to the cause of the financial crisis, the second and third explore the

2 regulatory failures which Friedman and Kraus believe are responsible for the crisis, and the final chapter is a more broad take on the psychology of market behavior as well as the ideology of its players, including regulators.

The first element of conventional wisdom concerning the

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