The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

This book challenges amoral views of finance as the leading realm in which mammon – wealth and profit – is pursued with little overt regard for morality. The author details an enhanced ethical emphasis by leading Anglo–American professionals in the aftermath of the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Instead of merely stressing expert knowledge, professionals sought to overcome the alleged impossibility of serving “two masters” – mammon and God – by embracing religious finance, socio-economic inequality, sustainability and other overtly moral issues. Continuities in liberal values and ideas, however, limited the impact of this enhanced ethical emphasis to restoring the professional authority, as well as to more fundamentally reforming of Anglo–American finance following the most severe period of instability since the Great Depression. Providing a nuanced account of post-crisis change and continuity in a crucially important industry, Campbell-Verduyn advances a dynamic, process-based understanding of authority that will appeal to international political economists and sociologists alike.

Contents: (1) Recent Developments and Analysis; (2) The Global Financial Crisis and U.S. Interests: Policy; Four Phases of the Global Financial Crisis; (3) New Challenges and Policy in Managing Financial Risk; (4) Origins, Contagion, and Risk; (5) Effects on Emerging Markets: Latin America; Russia and the Financial Crisis; (6) Effects on Europe and The European Response: The ¿European Framework for Action¿; The British Rescue Plan; Collapse of Iceland¿s Banking Sector; (7) Impact on Asia and the Asian Response: Asian Reserves and Their Impact; National Responses; (8) International Policy Issues: Bretton Woods II; G-20 Meetings; The International Monetary Fund; Changes in U.S. Reg¿s. and Regulatory Structure; (9) Legislation.

This paper investigates empirically the drivers of financial imbalances ahead of the global financial crisis. Three factors may have contributed to the build-up of financial imbalances: (i) rising global imbalances (capital flows), (ii) monetary policy that might have been too loose, (iii) inadequate supervision and regulation. Panel data regressions are performed for OECD countries from 1999 to 2007, so as to shed light on the relative importance of these factors, as well as the extent to which these factors might have interacted in fuelling the build-up. We find that the build-up of financial imbalances was driven by capital inflows and an associated compression of the spread between long and short rates. The effect of capital inflows on the build-up is amplified where the supervisory and regulatory environment was relatively weak. We find that, by contrast, differences in monetary policy cannot account for differences across countries in the build-up of financial imbalances ahead of the crisis.

Crisis and Response: An FDIC History, 2008¿2013 reviews the experience of the FDIC during a period in which the agency was confronted with two interconnected and overlapping crises¿first, the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, and second, a banking crisis that began in 2008 and continued until 2013. The history examines the FDIC¿s response, contributes to an understanding of what occurred, and shares lessons from the agency¿s experience.

The global financial crisis (GFC) has renewed interest in emergency liquidity support (sometimes referred to as “Lender of Last Resort”) provided by central banks to financial institutions and challenged the traditional way of conducting these operations. Despite a vast literature on the topic, central bank approaches and practices vary considerably. In this paper we focus on, for the most part, the provision of idiosyncratic support, approaching it from an operational perspective; highlighting different approaches adopted by central banks; and also identifying some of the issues that arose during the GFC.

The 2008 crash was the worst financial crisis and the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. It triggered a complete overhaul of the global regulatory environment, ushering in a stream of new rules and laws to combat the perceived weakness of the financial system. While the global economy came back from the brink, the continuing effects of the crisis include increasing economic inequality and political polarization. After the Crash is an innovative analysis of the crisis and its ongoing influence on the global regulatory, financial, and political landscape, with timely discussions of the key issues for our economic future. It brings together a range of experts and practitioners, including Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner; former congressman Barney Frank; former treasury secretary Jacob Lew; Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England; and Steve Cutler, general counsel of JP Morgan Chase during the financial crisis. Each poses crucial questions: What were the origins of the crisis? How effective were international and domestic regulatory responses? Have we addressed the roots of the crisis through reform and regulation? Are our financial systems and the global economy better able to withstand another crash? After the Crash is vital reading as both a retrospective on the last crisis and an analysis of possible sources of the next one.