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1. Without the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Wall Street banks would not have survived the shock to the financial system that occurred in September 2008. Nor would they have subsequently accrued large profits and bonus pools in 2009. Shouldn’t a substantial share of those bonus pools be sequestered on bank balance sheets for several years to increase the banks’ capital levels and shield taxpayers against another bailout?

2. All deposits insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that were held by Wall Street financial conglomerates should have been insulated in separate bank subsidiaries that were prohibited from trading, holding derivative securities and investing in risky assets like equities or bonds with less than a AAA rating. Wouldn’t such safeguards have reduced excess banker risk-taking, thereby reducing the need for taxpayer bailouts?

3. Wall Street turbocharged the subprime mortgage boom from 2002 to 2006 by providing billions in cheap warehouse loans to non-bank lenders that otherwise had virtually no capital or financing. Had the Federal Reserve kept short-term interest rates at a more normal 4 percent to 5 percent, rather than pushing them down to 1 percent, would this not have greatly curtailed the reckless growth of subprime loans?

 DAVID STOCKMAN, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan

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1. One result of the Pecora commission, the Depression equivalent of this investigation, was the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banking separate from commercial banking until the act was repealed in 1999. Many experts now believe that divide should be reinstated. Yet commercial banks like Washington Mutual lost a lot of money during the crisis without having any investment banking activities, and pure investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed without being deposit-taking institutions. This suggests that the problem does not lie with mingling commercial and investment banking. Are you in favor of the return of Glass-Steagall, and why?

2. Many people argue that the financial industry now accounts for far too much of the gross domestic product and that it is unproductive, indeed counterproductive, to devote so much of the nation’s resources to simply moving money around rather than making things. Why has this shift occurred and what, if anything, can the government do about it?

3. Over the last 20 years, the world of finance has been irrevocably transformed: individuals have moved their money from savings accounts into money market funds, and institutional investors now keep their cash in the repo market, where Treasury securities are borrowed and lent, rather than as deposits in commercial banks. As a result, before the crisis, half of the credit provided in the United States was being channeled outside the commercial banking system. What regulatory changes do we need to ensure that our current financial system is as stable as the traditional banking system that served us so well from 1936 to 1996?

 LIAQUAT AHAMED, the author of “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World”

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1. Describe in detail the three worst investments your bank made in 2007 and 2008  that is, those transactions on which you lost the most money. How much did the bank lose in each case?