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I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
C. Recommendations
The four causative factors examined in this Report are interconnected. Lenders introduced new levels of risk into the U.S. financial system by selling and securitizing complex home loans with high risk features and poor underwriting. The credit rating agencies labeled the resulting securities as safe investments, facilitating their purchase by institutional investors around the world. Federal banking regulators failed to ensure safe and sound lending practices and risk management, and stood on the sidelines as large financial institutions active in U.S. financial markets purchased billions of dollars in mortgage related securities containing high risk, poor quality mortgages. Investment banks magnified the risk to the system by engineering and promoting risky mortgage related structured finance products, and enabling investors to use naked credit default swaps and synthetic instruments to bet on the failure rather than the success of U.S. financial instruments. Some investment banks also ignored the conflicts of interest created by their products, placed their financial interests before those of their clients, and even bet against the very securities they were recommending and marketing to their clients. Together these factors produced a mortgage market saturated with high risk, poor quality mortgages and securities that, when they began incurring losses, caused financial institutions around the world to lose billions of dollars, produced rampant unemployment and foreclosures, and ruptured faith in U.S. capital markets.
Nearly three years later, the U.S. economy has yet to recover from the damage caused by the 2008 financial crisis. This Report is intended to help analysts, market participants, policymakers, and the public gain a deeper understanding of the origins of the crisis and take the steps needed to prevent excessive risk taking and conflicts of interest from causing similar damage in the future. Each of the four chapters in this Report examining a key aspect of the financial crisis begins with specific findings of fact, details the evidence gathered by the Subcommittee, and ends with recommendations. For ease of reference, all of the recommendations are reprinted here. For more information about each recommendation, please see the relevant chapter.
Recommendations on High Risk Lending
Federal regulators should use their regulatory authority to ensure that all mortgages deemed to be "qualified residential mortgages" have a low risk of delinquency or default.
1. Ensure "Qualified Mortgages" Are Low Risk.
2. Require Meaningful Risk Retention. Federal regulators should issue a strong risk retention requirement under Section 941 by requiring the retention of not less than a 5% credit risk in each, or a representative sample of, an asset backed securitization's tranches, and by barring a hedging offset for a reasonable but limited period of time.
3. Safeguard Against High Risk Products. Federal banking regulators should safeguard taxpayer dollars by requiring banks with high risk structured finance products, including complex products with little or no reliable performance data, to meet conservative loss reserve, liquidity, and capital requirements.
4. Require Greater Reserves for Negative Amortization Loans. Federal banking regulators should use their regulatory authority to require banks issuing negatively amortizing loans that allow borrowers to defer payments of interest and principal, to maintain more conservative loss, liquidity, and capital reserves.
5. Safeguard Bank Investment Portfolios. Federal banking regulators should use the Section 620 banking activities study to identify high risk structured finance products and impose a reasonable limit on the amount of such high risk products that can be included in a bank's investment portfolio.
Recommendations on Regulatory Failures
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) should complete the dismantling of the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), despite attempts by some OTS officials to preserve the agency's identity and influence within the OCC.
1. Complete OTS Dismantling.
2. Strengthen Enforcement. Federal banking regulators should conduct a review of their major financial institutions to identify those with ongoing, serious deficiencies, and review their enforcement approach to those institutions to eliminate any policy of deference to bank management, inflated CAMELS ratings, or use of short term profits to excuse high risk activities.
3. Strengthen CAMELS Ratings. Federal banking regulators should undertake a comprehensive review of the CAMELS ratings system to produce ratings that signal whether an institution is expected operate in a safe and sound manner over a specified period of time, asset quality ratings that reflect embedded risks rather than short term profits, management ratings that reflect any ongoing failure to correct identified deficiencies, and composite ratings that discourage systemic risks.
4. Evaluate Impacts of High Risk Lending. The Financial Stability Oversight Council should undertake a study to identify high risk lending practices at financial institutions, and evaluate the nature and significance of the impacts that these practices may have on U.S. financial systems as a whole.
Recommendations on Inflated Credit Ratings
The SEC should use its regulatory authority to rank the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations in terms of performance, in particular the accuracy of their ratings.
1. Rank Credit Rating Agencies by Accuracy.
2. Help Investors Hold CRAs Accountable. The SEC should use its regulatory authority to facilitate the ability of investors to hold credit rating agencies accountable in civil lawsuits for inflated credit ratings, when a credit rating agency knowingly or recklessly fails to conduct a reasonable investigation of the rated security.
3. Strengthen CRA Operations. The SEC should use its inspection, examination, and regulatory authority to ensure credit rating agencies institute internal controls, credit rating methodologies, and employee conflict of interest safeguards that advance rating accuracy.
4. Ensure CRAs Recognize Risk. The SEC should use its inspection, examination, and regulatory authority to ensure credit rating agencies assign higher risk to financial instruments whose performance cannot be reliably predicted due to their novelty or complexity, or that rely on assets from parties with a record for issuing poor quality assets.
5. Strengthen Disclosure. The SEC should exercise its authority under the new Section 78o-7(s) of Title 15 to ensure that the credit rating agencies complete the required new ratings forms by the end of the year and that the new forms provide comprehensible, consistent, and useful ratings information to investors, including by testing the proposed forms with actual investors.
6. Reduce Ratings Reliance. Federal regulators should reduce the federal government's reliance on privately issued credit ratings.
Recommendations on Investment Bank Abuses
Federal regulators should review the RMBS, CDO, CDS, and ABX activities described in this Report to identify any violations of law and to examine ways to strengthen existing regulatory prohibitions against abusive practices involving structured finance products.
1. Review Structured Finance Transactions.
2. Narrow Proprietary Trading Exceptions. To ensure a meaningful ban on proprietary trading under Section 619, any exceptions to that ban, such as for marketmaking or risk-mitigating hedging activities, should be strictly limited in the implementing regulations to activities that serve clients or reduce risk.
3. Design Strong Conflict of Interest Prohibitions. Regulators implementing the conflict of interest prohibitions in Sections 619 and 621 should consider the types of conflicts of interest in the Goldman Sachs case study, as identified in Chapter VI(C)(6) of this Report.
4. Study Bank Use of Structured Finance. Regulators conducting the banking activities study under Section 620 should consider the role of federally insured banks in designing, marketing, and investing in structured finance products with risks that cannot be reliably measured and naked credit default swaps or synthetic financial instruments.
Back to Contents B. Overview II. BACKGROUND
This document has been published on 08Jul11 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
