Who bears responsibility for the financial crisis? The list of possible culprits is unmanageably long and at times internally inconsistent, as it includes subprime mortgagees and over-zealous mortgage originators; risk-happy investment bankers and the ineffectual ratings agents who rubber-stamped the bankers' exotic products; and neoconservatives hell-bent on deregulation along with liberal politicians cowering before entities they allowed to become too big to fail. *302 Nonetheless the question of responsibility seems to demand an answer not only for purposes of arriving at lessons that might avert a future crisis but also for answering a second question that seems a natural corollary of the first -- viz., who bears responsibility for funding the bailouts necessitated by the financial crisis? More specifically, who in the United States bears responsibility for funding the bailouts undertaken by the U.S. government?To the extent that the question of responsibility for funding the bailout tracks all and only those individuals and entities that culpably precipitated the crisis, the question is misguided. I want to argue that the answer to the question of responsibility for funding the bailout is broader than typically thought, and this is so in two respects. First, while commentators are inclined to focus on culpable constituents -- like bankers, regulators, lenders and borrowers -- I shall contend that one can locate blameworthiness, and so liability to pay, in large swaths of the American public, which embraced an ethos of easy money that fundamentally fueled much of the reckless speculating that caused the collapse. Second, even though many Americans did not find themselves caught up in the easy money ethos, all Americans may be made to pay, just in virtue of their shared membership in the polity that allowed the crisis to occur. The central claim of this paper is, then, that we may justify Main Street's bailing out of Wall Street on a theory of shared responsibility that has been overlooked.On the other hand, the very theory that would justify widespread responsibility for crisis clean up also justifies widespread responsibility to rectify numerous other social and economic ills. There are clearly compelling practical reasons for which the crisis bailout has received priority, chief among which is the widespread devastation that would have been wrought were our economy to have collapsed. Nonetheless, we need not blithely defer rectification of these other social and economic ills in favor of the bailout efforts. Instead, their existence might guide or condition the distribution of bailout obligations, as I *303 argue in the last part of the paper.By arguing that the American public as a whole bears responsibility for the crisis, I do not mean to absolve key players in the financial industry from blame. Yet much of the scholarship produced in the wake of the crisis seeks to do just this. I begin, then, in Part I, by critiquing some of the explanations for the financial crisis proffered by others, not because these misidentify the crisis's causal contributions but instead because they misconstrue the moral nature of these contributions. In Part II, I turn to a more encompassing account of responsibility for the financial crisis, which seeks to draw out the ways in which many lay investors -- ordinary people, not opportunistic borrowers, or predatory lenders, or Wall Street gurus -- bear responsibility for the crisis, in light of their having invited, and perhaps even demanded, excessive risk-taking on the part of their financial advisors. Part III seeks to extend the account of responsibility further, by arguing that even those Americans who handled their money with the utmost of prudence may be made to contribute to the bailout funds. While Part III thereby seeks to articulate a ground upon which to hold the American people as a whole responsible for funding the bailout, Part IV argues that we may not insist upon this ground without also insisting that the populace attend to other social and economic ills. The bailout, that is, necessitates and should be accompanied by, an effort to reduce existing inequalities in wealth. Part V concludes.
Read full abstract
Apr 3, 2019
Andrew Schmulow + 2
Open Access