Thanks to Wikicommons

Some of our readers may recall we recently suffered from a minor inconvenience called “the World Financial Meltdown”.

If you are still asking yourself, How the @#$%&!! did that disaster happen?…we have good news!

The US Government has the answers in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Final Report.

It is a beast of a report so rather than have you wade through hundreds of pages of financial analysis, we’ll let the Internet do the mining for you.

The wonderful financial blog Calculated Risk highlights the reports BIG conclusion that the

financial crisis was avoidable. …

Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. … Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner.

Expanding on the points produced in the report Calculated Risk describes

the keys to the crisis are 1) the willful lack of regulators to do their jobs, combined with 2) the rapid “innovation” in the mortgage market

For a deeper look at who’s to blame check out Frum Forum’s collection of posts on the report.

The system may have failed in the past but this new information should let us prevent future meltdowns right?

Don’t count on it.  As Sewell Chan, of Economix, notes:

The Wall Street overhaul enacted last year hopes to blunt the impact of such boom-and-bust cycles — by reining in the use of exotic financial instruments, better supervising big banks and limiting the damage if one of them fails.

But the first two efforts are under attack by the new Republican majority in the House, and the new process for containing the fallout from a giant bank’s collapse is untested. Meanwhile, the financial sector’s outsize role in the economy hasn’t changed; the giant banks that were considered “too big to fail” have only gotten bigger.

Not very comforting is it?