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Financial crisis was 'avoidable', says official US report
Wall Street bankers, regulators, government officials and even homeowners all share part of the blame for the 2008 financial crisis, according to a scathing US official investigation into the meltdown published today.
The 545-page Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) report reads like a financial thriller in which there are very few heroes. One chapter on the boom and bust fiasco is entitled "The Madness".
The commission concludes that the crisis was avoidable.
"As this report goes to print, there are 26 million Americans who are out of work ... Nearly $11 trillion in household wealth has vanished ... The collateral damage of this crisis has been real people and real communities. The impacts of this crisis are likely to be felt for a generation," the report says.
So far, the 2008 financial crisis has led to few prosecutions. The authors interviewed more than 700 witnesses to compile the report and said they had referred potential violations to the appropriate authorities.
While the crisis was years in the making, it was the collapse of the housing bubble that triggered the 2008 collapse. Trillions of dollars in risky, sub-prime mortgages had been embedded in the system. When the housing bubble burst, the impact was magnified by complex financial derivatives based on those loans, whose risks had been woefully underestimated.