The recent financial crisis was an accident, a "perfect storm" fueled by anunforeseeable confluence of events that unfortunately combined to bring down the global financialsystems. And policy makers? They did everything they could, given their limited authority. It wasall a terrible, unavoidable accident. Or at least this is the story told and retold by a chorus ofluminaries that includes Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, and AlanGreenspan.
In Guardians of Finance, economists James Barth,Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine argue that the financial meltdown of 2007 to 2009 was no accident; itwas negligent homicide. They show that senior regulatory officials around the world knew or shouldhave known that their policies were destabilizing the global financial system, had years to processthe evidence that risks were rising, had the authority to change their policies--and yet chose notto act until the crisis had fully emerged.
The current system, the authors write,is simply not designed to make policy choices on behalf of the public. It is virtually impossiblefor the public and its elected officials to obtain informed and impartial assessment of financialregulation and to hold regulators accountable. Barth, Caprio, and Levine propose a reform to counterthis systemic failure: the establishment of a "Sentinel" to provide an informed, expert,and independent assessment of financial regulation. Its sole power would be to demand informationand to evaluate it from the perspective of the public--rather than that of the financial industry,the regulators, or politicians.
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