Politics

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report Drops

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

Back in 2009, one of the first things Congress did to actually start dealing with the causes of the economic crisis was to give the Justice Department more power to detect and prosecute fraud in the financial markets. As part of that bill, the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, they created a bipartisan commission “to examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States” and laid out 22 specific areas of financial activity for them to investigate. Today, more than 20 months after the bill was signed into law, the commission has released their report.

It’s 576 pages in paperback form, and you can get download it in parts, for free, from the commission’s website. Over the past year or so, the commission spent hundreds of hours interviewing mortgage servicers, bank CEOs and regulators. They also subpoenaed thousands of pages of never-before-seen documents from financial companies that shed some new light on the failures of corporate governance that led to excessive risk-taking throughout Wall Street and necessitated the bailouts when they inevitably collapsed.

Anyways, put this on your to-do list for the weekend. This is the crisis of our generation, and it is why millions of people have been kicked out of their homes and left without work. Given the total failure of the elites in charge of the economy and all the suffering they have caused, it’s remarkable that there isn’t more anger directed at them these days. Hopefully this will rekindle some of the rage. It would be a healthy thing.

Full post as published by Open Congress on January 27, 2011 (boomark / email).