After Iceland’s three big go-go banks all collapsed in fall 2008, the country’s parliament (Althingi) established a Special Investigation Commission to investigate and analyze the processes leading to their collapse. The SIC delivered its report to Althingi on Monday.
The English version of its key chapters is here.
A hat-tip for that to Calculated Risk, who wrote, “It has it all – regulatory capture, oblivious politicians, shadow banking, loans to shareholders to buy shares and more.”
Calc also has some informative excerpts from the SIC report in that post.
Here in the U.S., Congress proceeded in a much more stately (= slow) fashion. It did not establish its Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission until May last year, five months after Althingi did so. And the FCIC will not be submitting its report until December 15.
That’s a pity, because we as citizens really need to gain a clear picture of what went wrong in the go-go years– especially if our legislators are to enact new laws to try to prevent another massive meltdown like the one of September 2008. (A resurrection of the Glass-Steagall protections, anyone?)
The FCIC is giving us a bit more information than we had before. But it still feels awfully slow. And many of the banks have returned straight to same kind of predatory practices they were engaged in before.