Financial Crisis Cause No. 1: Wall Street's shifting demographics.

In the commission's report Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke describes recent events as "the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression." The event, in other words, was unprecedented. To understand an event that has never before occurred, we must logically begin with those factors that have never before been present. On Wall Street, the most obvious such factor is women.

Distorted Judgment

Of course, the women who flooded into Wall Street firms before the crisis weren't typically permitted to take big financial risks. As a rule they remained in the background, as "helpmates." But their presence clearly distorted the judgment of male bond traders --- though the mechanics of their influence remains unexplored by the commission (on which several women sat).

They may have compelled the male risk takers to "show off for the ladies," for instance, or perhaps they merely asked annoying questions and undermined the risk takers' confidence.

At any rate, one sure sign of the importance of women in the financial crisis is the market's subsequent response: to purge women from senior Wall Street roles. Wall Street's gender problem is, for the moment, of merely academic interest. Less academic is...

Moral Collapse

Financial Crisis Cause No. 2: The moral collapse of the American working class.

David Fuller's view The increasing satirization of the West's credit and insolvency crisis is further evidence that the world has moved on from that preoccupation, in case one did not believe the increasing evidence from global stock market trends over the last two years.