The Great Recession Was Avoidable

Those of you who have read my book The Intuitive Investor: A Radical Guide for Manifesting Wealth know that I retired from my position as co-portfolio manager of the Davis Appreciation & Income Fund after a meditation I had in New York City on October 21, 2004 in which I could see quite clearly that there was going to be a financial crisis of gigantic proportion.

Now the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a federal inquiry into the Great Recession’s causes, has released its report.  In short it says that much of the denial that we have heard from politicians, regulators and business people over the last 3 years is hokum.  Specifically the report says:

“The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done.  If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”

The report also lays the blame for the crisis on regulators, a couple of presidential administrations, and the Federal Reserve chairmen, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.  This strongly echoes comments that I made in my Proposal for Change, Part I and Proposal for Change, Part II posts of two years ago.  In a 576 page book to be published on Thursday the commission has distilled 19 days of hearings and over 700 interviews with participants into a scathing indictment of those involved.

Shocking.

If only it were that.  What is shocking is that the leadership of our country, from business people to politicians to regulators continue to abrogate their responsibility to us.  And the excuse is always the same, “How could we have known?”  As a heartfelt, but heart-centered capitalist, this nonsense is increasingly difficult to stomach.

Even if this were true – which it isn’t – it wouldn’t be a reasonable excuse.  Folks, claiming to be ignorant or stupid works when you are a kid and you don’t know better.  And it may work as an adult, but adults are charged with a higher level of responsibility than children – which is why we fire adults who claim ignorance or stupidity in the face of trillions of dollars of lost economic growth.

I myself have talked at great length about the sources and causes of this economic catastrophe from the beginnings of my blog.  If you are interested in my discourse on this, check out the following postings, all from 2008 and early 2009.  If I could identify the causes of this catastrophe, how could people that were actually on the front lines of the crisis not?

• the “financial crisis” is really an ethical crisis
• ethics are an economic issue
• a proposal for change, part I
• a proposal for change, part II

I hope that this report gets play from the major news media because it is a story that deserves to be told to the United States’ citizenry.  Hopefully it doesn’t create more cynicism, but instead scrutiny of our very powerful, largely unchecked, institutions.

If you care about capitalism then you have to be willing to criticize it, not to destroy it, but to save it!

Jason