Received wisdom about the 2008 financial crisis has not been faring well lately. Peter Wallison, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, demonstrates in a new book that the subprime housing boom was fostered mainly by federal housing politics and policy, not by the rampant "deregulation" that many have imagined out of whole cloth. Another revelation: The New York Fed staff, as we belatedly learned last year, prepared an analysis showing that Lehman at the time of its collapse was theoretically solvent after all... OK, what about "too big to fail"? Nobody has found an email from a CEO saying,...
