For the macro book that I am working on, I wanted to refresh my memory for how the financial crisis played out. I went back to blog posts that I wrote in 2007. You can find them here. Scroll down to December, and look for posts “subprime daily briefing” (sometimes named slightly differently).

I staked out an early position against bailing our borrowers. I have no regrets there. At one point I said that the total wealth loss from the crisis would not be as large as the loss from popping the dotcom bubble–I think I was wrong about that.

I also staked out an early position in favor of capital forbearance by bank regulators, meaning that they would not force banks to sell assets at distressed prices to meet capital requirements. I still think that compared with what regulators actually did, this was a better approach.

Also interesting are the various links from the posts. For example, I found a paper by Michael Bordo, dated September 28, 2007.

Many of the financial crises of the past involved financial innovation which increased leverage. The 1763 crisis was centered on the market for bills of exchange, Penn Central on the newly revived (in the 1960s) commercial paper market, the savings and loan crisis of the early 1980s on the junk bond market, LTCM on derivatives and hedge funds.

In the most recent episode, the financial innovation derived from the securitization of subprime mortgages and other loans has shifted risk away from the originating bank into mortgage and other asset backed securities which bundle the risk of less stellar borrowers with more creditworthy ones and which were certified by the credit rating agencies as prime . These have been absorbed by hedge funds in the US and abroad, by offshore banks and in the asset backed commercial paper of the commercial and investment banks. As Rajan ( 2005) argued, shifting the risk away from banks who used to have the incentives to monitor their borrowers to hedge funds and other institutions which do not, rather than reducing overall systemic risk increased it by raising the risk of a much more widespread meltdown in theevent of a tail event as we are currently witnessing.