wow sir, such allegations, who are you again?
I must owe you money for living in your head. Wait a second, ill get my checkbook

 

Mark to Market

Liar Loans

 

yes i agree, both were not regulated enough right before the crash

 

Europe has had a form of this for almost 20 years. It didn’t kill the airlines or passenger demand due to higher prices.

 

Ask the passengers if they'd rather have the flight cancelled and get rescheduled or if they'd rather be trapped on a plane with limited AC, no food, no drinks and full laws for 8 hours, when each scenario puts them at their destination about the same time. I'm sure they'd rather be in the terminal rebooking a flight.

 

My favorite: NINJA loans. (No Income, No Job, No assets).

Plenty of fraud by banks and investment houses though, large and small. The Community Reinvestment Act wasn't great, was a problem, but if anything it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

The real problem: Corporate officers are no longer held criminally liable for corporate malfeasance. The haven't been since the Enron debacle which tanked not just Enron but the accounting firm Arthur Anderson which led to tens of thousands of job losses.

Matt Taibbi wrote a great book about this. "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap".

Highly recommended.

 

A ton of the $700 billion went to executive bonuses. Not only is there no accountability, but they also get a reward. Kind of like my airlines CEO and upper management. They met reduced goals on a made-up score card, and gave themselves bonuses for pretty much screwing up every decision over the last 3 yrs.

 

Regarding the 2008/2009 financial crisis and the role of regulation.
In 1932 the USA embarked on a major paradigm shift in its relationship between the Federal Govt and many facets of American life, including banking. I don't remember the blow-by-blow details, but by WW2 there were significant restrictions in place on what banks could and couldn't do. What liquidity they had to have on hand, etc. While various details were constantly adjusted, the fundamental framework of conservative limits on what banks could do kept the economy free of crisis until the 1980's. There were zero panics for almost 50 years.

The 80's brought in the second paradigm shift of the 20th century. The regulations that had made banking the staid, boring, but stable institution it was, started to be repealed.
America had had zero bank crisis since the mid thirties. They have become so frequent since 1980 that most who visit this board assume it to be normal. It is almost a certainty that a major factor in the change to financial stability has been the major undoing of the safeguards put into place in the 1930's.

Those changes (which I am too lazy to research, my generality's will have to suffice) are the structural shifts that lead to the 2008/2009 cockup. The various other stuff that is hyped is just adjusting the size of the barn door after all the horses have escaped.
The real problem is we, as a society, got lazy and greedy. If the market is infallible, then we need do nothing but just drift along. If the market is infallible, then any profits earned by individuals or corporate entities are morally justified. There is no need to protect the economy as a whole (and by extension the 'weak '). Any redistribution of wealth is 'mete, right, and salutary'.

In discussing complex systems we tend to lose ourselves discussing details. Finding major leverage points that changed our ways of thinking and what we expect of our institutions are what matter. Those leverage points change our destination(s). The details just affect ride and fuel burn.

Regarding the threads original topic. The proposed regs might help with the details of flight disruptions. A better approach would be to find some of the root causes for the meltdowns. The downside of the finding of root causes probably would go back decades, and we might discover them to be now "baked into the pie".

 

Thanks for the book tip.

 

It's not just corporate...when is the last time you've heard of a govt official (bureaucrat) being held accountable for incompetence or malfeasance? Other than the occasional political hack that gets forced out, most just retire to obscurity.