Disclaimer:  Some of you will be aware that I have a pretty strong opinion on this, which is that the opposite is true. 

But having said that, I really want to satisfy my curiosity.  This isn't a thread to start a fight (although I won't be surprised if some discussion occurs) and it certainly isn't meant as trolling libertarians or anything. 

Whether it's you, or a politician, or a pundit, I want to know who out there thinks the subprime mortgage crisis and bank failures are a result of too MUCH regulation. 

Let's keep this clean, everyone.  My goal in this thread is to REGISTER opinions here, not fight over them. 

Too much regulation was the problem? Did you get your thread title wrong?

The problem is that people oversimplify what caused this financial crisis.  There was no one cause to this problem. It was like everybody in the car was having a good time and not paying attention to where they were going. Then everyone realized they were driving in the complete wrong direction. Then everyone starts to blame each other when it was really everyone's fault.

Banks and financial firms were definitely in the driver's seat though.

Too much regulation on the part of Community Reinvestment Act, yeah. More so on enforcement of the CRA though.

and so the political wars begin again

No it won't. I follow the OP's rules.

I think the current financial crisis is due to the shift of well-paying jobs from rich nations to poorer ones. Many millions of well-paying jobs have been lost over the years but the devastation to the economy remained partially hidden because the unemployment rate is typically used to reflect the health of the economy. Someone's $30/hr manufacturing job could be replaced by a $10/hr service job and the unemployment rate wouldn't reflect any difference.

The problem didn't catch up with us because the money many companies saved ended up in the hands of shareholders. They helped keep the economy going business as usual but eventually the loss of those jobs would catch up. There simply wasn't enough people with the purchasing power needed to keep things going as they were. Especially since debt was piling up for those who lost their well-paying job but attempted to keep up the same standard of living.

Also wealthy nations expected to replace economies with manufacturing as their backbone to ones with service industries but that backfired because even many of the jobs they expected to use in such an economy are also being exported. Simply put poorer nations are increasing their standard of living and infrastructure at the expense of richer nations.

Anyways that's what I think happened. I also think the money that governments are pouring in to fix the problem are short-term solutions that won't fix the problem. The government can't prop up the economy forever and when the money runs dry we're back in the same situation again. Possibly even worse since companies are responding to the crisis with layoffs and exporting even more jobs.

too much? i dont know about the US, but in the UK its most definetley TOO LITTLE regulation thats the problem

I don't think stockholders have enough power.

It should be much easier to sue executives for violations of their fiduciary duty.

It isn't the government that should be outraged by AIG bonuses, it should be AIG stockholders. Though of course I think the government is the majority holder.

I skipped every post in the thread and am responding to the topic title: No. Opposite.

I'll avoid going too in depth and go to my basic point:

I don't really even look at it as too much or too little regulation. Regulation either is or is not effective and it's evident to me that elegant regulations that are effective are vastly preferably to oppressive regulations even if they are also effective.

It's also clear that this particular set of regulations were ineffective...whether they were well enumerated or incomplete really only serves to reduce the issue to an ideological debate. The simple fact is that the regulations failed to maintain the stability of the lending markets and either introduced or left unchecked destabilizing activities.

It's certainly a fair point that an elegant solution is more work but I don't see why we should pay our public servants for shoddy work simply because doing it right is tough. They already let their staffers shoulder the majority of the real work anyways so I'm not exactly sympathetic to the "but that would be hard!" argument.