Boom and Collapse of The Shadow Banking System
The non-depository banking system grew to exceed the size of the regulated depository banking system. However, the investment banks, insurers, hedge funds, and money market funds within the non-depository system were not subject to the same regulations as the depository system, such as depositor insurance and bank capital restrictions. Many of these institutions suffered the equivalent of a bank run with the notable collapses of Lehman Brothers and AIG during September 2008 precipitating a financial crisis and subsequent recession.
The FCIC report explained how this evolving system remained ineffectively regulated: "In the early part of the 20th century, we erected a series of protections—the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort, federal deposit insurance, ample regulations—to provide a bulwark against the panics that had regularly plagued America’s banking system in the 19th century. Yet, over the past 30-plus years, we permitted the growth of a shadow banking system—opaque and laden with shortterm debt—that rivaled the size of the traditional banking system. Key components of the market—for example, the multitrillion-dollar repo lending market, off-balance-sheet entities, and the use of over-the-counter derivatives—were hidden from view, without the protections we had constructed to prevent financial meltdowns. We had a 21st-century financial system with 19th-century safeguards."
Read more about this topic: Government Policies And The Subprime Mortgage Crisis
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—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I’ll be all right; I’ve got a few veg.”
—Margaret Drabble (b. 1939)
“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
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—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“One of the reforms to be carried out during the incoming administration is a change in our monetary and banking laws, so as to secure greater elasticity in the forms of currency available for trade and to prevent the limitations of law from operating to increase the embarrassment of a financial panic.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)