After the Congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issued its report last week, there was a virtually unanimous, critical reaction. The report said little new. Its analysis was undermined by sharp partisan division because the six Democratic members differed with the four Republicans about the role of regulation. And its impact would be limited because it appeared after Congress enacted major financial services reform (Dodd-Frank).

But these assessments ignored a fundamental agreement among nine of the 10 members — a source of the report’s continuing importance. The bipartisan commissioners emphatically concluded that one of the primary causes of the meltdown was massive failure of private sector decision-making, especially in major financial institutions.

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