Commentary

Reconsidering the Financial Crisis

Recently we sat down with Peter Wallison, the Arthur F. Burns Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a member of the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (which was set up to look into the causes of the crisis), to ask him whether his initial hypotheses of what caused the crisis are still holding up. Wallison has been one of the leading critics of the government for its role in the housing bubble and financial crisis, but the extended time since the dust of the Wall Street collapse finally began to settle has also allowed for more in-depth research into the imbalances in the financial sector that ultimately led to economic catastrophe, allowing for previously rock solid theories of what caused the crisis to be re-examined and reconsidered.

In a three part interview, we discussed is theory that the financial crisis would not have been possible without government housing policy, whether we are responding to the aftermath of the crisis well, and what we should be looking for after the 2012 election.

All three parts are available here, and below is a five minute video edited from the interview.