Feb 27, 2010

"Understanding what caused the recent financial crisis is essential to successfully refining the practice of finance to reduce the odds of repeating it. So the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Friday and Saturday heard several academic economists’ take on what led to a near meltdown of the global economy.

Understanding what caused the recent financial crisis is essential to successfully refining the practice of finance to reduce the odds of repeating it. So the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Friday and Saturday heard several academic economists’ take on what led to a near meltdown of the global economy.

'We are now very slowly emerging from the worst financial and housing crisis since the Great Depression,' Christopher Mayer of the Columbia Business School told the commission. The panel, he said, 'stands in a unique place to examine the causes of this crisis so we can understand how to prevent this from happening in the future….It is important for us to take a critical look at what went wrong and strive not to repeat it.'

Here are some highlights of the professors’ prepared testimony, as posted on the commission’s Web site."

Click to go to the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog and view the entire post.