Ilargi, nail, head:
But is that true? Did deregulation really cause the crisis? I don’t believe it did, I think deregulation is just a consequence of what lies beneath and beyond. It’s no secret for anyone with a working brain that banks need to be cut down at the ankles; what remains hidden is the part […]

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Peter Boone and Simon Johnson in the New Republic:
Fifteen years ago, the combined assets of our six biggest banks totaled 17 percent of our GDP. By 2006, that number was 55 percent. Right now, it stands at 63 percent.
And this:
The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for […]

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Ooooo, you gotta love this:
Jason Goldberg is the CEO of a company called Fabulis, which is developing a website, iPhone app and social media application targeted at gay men. His company — which is at least his third start-up — is funded by investors including The Washington Post and the venture capitalist Allen Morgan, and […]

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Via Atrios, CRE being commercial real estate, which is expected to hit the wall this year - maybe particularly hard in places like Lancaster County:

Emphasis added (and crudely, too).

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Sullivan with a very good call:
The theories of self-regulating markets that guaranteed no collapse turned out to be profoundly flawed - as most intelligent conservatives (Posner, Bartlett, et al.) have now observed. And the oh-so-clever mechanisms the bankers invented to give themselves more and more and more turned out - surprise! - to be mathematically […]

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Busy week, missed this when it happened. Extremely important:
For much of last year, Paul Volcker wandered the country arguing for tougher restraints on big banks while the Obama administration pursued a more moderate regulatory agenda driven by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.
Thursday morning at the White House, it seemed as if the two men had […]

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Had caught part of this earlier in the week, the statements by the banksters at the opening of the “Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,” during which the likes of Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase did their best deer-in-the-headlights routine and said - actually said! - that no one gave a thought to the possibility that housing prices […]

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