From The Warning:
“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. “They were totally opposed to it,” Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?”
Fractional reserve banking is not free market capitalism, but constructive fraud, especially when banks create credit they cannot act as guarantor. Banks, according to Minksy, were out of good collateral nearly 40 years ago and operated on a series of shell games, pushing the envelope of the FDIC shaddow provided them.