COMMENT In recent weeks our financial markets have shown signs of recovery thanks to unprecedented action to stabilise markets and stimulate the economy. Yet this crisis has many distressing qualities. Perhaps most dispiriting is the sense that we have seen this movie before, and it wasn’t very good the first time, either.
When President Bill Clinton came into office in the early 1990s, the US faced, among other challenges, waves of thrift and bank failures, huge hits to its deposit insurance system, and enormous piles of “toxic assets” in need of taxpayer-financed liquidation. It was a colossal regulatory failure.
