Eric Johnston
The seeds of the worldwide crisis were sown in the US as much as three decades ago
A DOCUMENT the size of a telephone book is doing the rounds of the boardrooms and being passed between executives of Australia’s banks.
Senior regulators have also been thumbing through the report, which dissects the origins of the financial crisis that is still sending shock waves through the global economy after three years.
The 576-page report, published a little more than a week ago by the US government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, has already started climbing best-seller lists.
The 10-member commission was created by Congress to investigate and explain the causes of the 2008 meltdown.
It sifted through millions of documents – many subpoenaed from banks – and held hundreds of interviews, and its assessment provides one of the most forensic accounts of how a seemingly stable system fell apart.
With Australia no stranger to heated housing markets, institutions that could be considered too big to fail, and with one of the most active securitisation markets in the world, are there lessons to be drawn from the US disaster that could add to the fireproofing of our financial system?
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