The True Story of the Financial Crisis

By Peter J. Wallison

As many readers of The American Spectator will know, I was a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member body appointed by Congress to investigate the causes of the financial crisis of 2008. The Commission issued its report in late January 2011, with a majority concluding that the crisis could have been avoided if the private sector had not taken so many risks and government regulators had not been asleep at the switch. I dissented from the majority's view, arguing in my dissent that the financial crisis would not have occurred if government housing policies had not fostered the creation of an unprecedented number of subprime and otherwise risky loans immediately before the financial crisis began.

After the majority's report was published, many people lamented that it was not possible to achieve a bipartisan agreement even on the facts. But the way the Commission was organized and run made this impossible. One glaring example will illustrate the problem. In March 2010, Edward Pinto, a resident fellow (and my colleague) at the American Enterprise Institute who had served as chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, sent the Commission a 70-page, fully sourced memorandum on the number of subprime and other high-risk mortgages in the financial system in 2008. Pinto's research showed that he had found more than 25 million such mortgages (his later work showed that there were approximately 27 million). Since there are about 55 million mortgages in the U.S., Pinto's research indicated that, as the financial crisis began, half of all U.S. mortgages were of inferior quality and liable to default when housing prices were no longer rising. In August, Pinto supplemented his initial research with a paper documenting the efforts of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), over two decades and through two administrations, to increase home ownership by reducing mortgage-underwriting standards.

This information, which highlighted the role of government policy in fostering the creation of these low-quality mortgages, raised important questions about whether the mortgage meltdown would have been so destructive if those government policies had not existed. Any objective investigation of the causes of the financial crisis would have looked carefully at Pinto's research, exposed it to the members of the Commission, taken Pinto's testimony, and tested the accuracy of his research. But the Commission took none of these steps. Pinto's memos were never made available to the other members of the FCIC, or even to the commissioners who were members of the subcommittee charged with considering the role of housing policy in the financial crisis.

Ultimately, I dissented from the Commission majority's report. There was no alternative. The Commission's management -- particularly its chairman, Philip Angelides, a former Democratic treasurer of California and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate -- would not allow the staff to pursue any theories about the causes of the financial crisis other than those embodied in the standard left-wing narrative. And in the end a majority of the commissioners -- never having been presented with any contrary evidence -- signed on to a report that said the financial crisis could have been avoided if there had been better regulation of the private sector.
 
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The True Story of the Financial Crisis | The American Spectator