Part II The Financial Crisis of 2007–2011, 6 Market and Regulatory Failure

Subject(s):

Credit risk — Lending and credit

This chapter first discusses the origins of the financial crisis, highlighting practice of ‘packaging and selling’ credit risk by financial market participants that led up to the crisis. It argues that although, in retrospect, many aspects of that practice look very bad indeed, the idea that banks might originate a credit exposure and then transfer the credit risk attached to it to a third party was, before the financial crisis, considered to be part and parcel of sound risk management. The discussion then turns to credit-rating agencies. Analysis of the financial crisis and ‘what went wrong’ has shown that rating agencies were too generous with their rating of many of the structured products that contributed to the collapse.