Lessons of the Financial Crisis : Council Special Report No. 45, March 2009

The story of the financial crisis will be retold endlessly as one of widespread greed, corruption, and incompetence, enabled by a policy agenda dominated by an ideology of deregulation. Yet even if the marketplace had been populated by more ethical and conscientious individuals, and even if their activities had been more carefully scrutinized by regulators, the world would still have wound up with a major boom and bustsuch is the power, as history attests, of cheap money.