Over two years ago, the United States and the global economy faced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis was rooted in years of unconstrained excess on Wall Street, and prolonged complacency in Washington and in major financial capitals around the world. The crisis made painfully clear what we should have always known–that finance cannot be left to regulate itself; that consumer markets permitted to profit on the basis of tricks and traps rather than to compete on the basis of price and quality will, ultimately, put us all at risk; that financial markets function best where there are clear rules, transparency and accountability; and that markets break down, sometimes catastrophically, where there are not.
For many years, a core strength of the U.S. financial system had been a regulatory structure that sought a careful balance between incentives for innovation and competition, on the one hand, and protections from excessive risk-taking or abuse, on the other.
Over time those great strengths were undermined. The careful mix of protections we created eventually eroded with the development of new products and markets for which those protections had not been designed. And our regulatory system found itself outgrown and outmaneuvered by the institutions and markets it was responsible for regulating and constraining.
