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CONCLUSIONS OF THE

FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been called upon to examine the finan-
cial and economic crisis that has gripped our country and explain its causes to the
American people. We are keenly aware of the significance of our charge, given the
economic damage that America has suffered in the wake of the greatest financial cri-
sis since the Great Depression.
Our task was first to determine what happened and how it happened so that we
could understand why it happened. Here we present our conclusions. We encourage
the American people to join us in making their own assessments based on the evi-
dence gathered in our inquiry. If we do not learn from history, we are unlikely to fully
recover from it. Some on Wall Street and in Washington with a stake in the status quo
may be tempted to wipe from memory the events of this crisis, or to suggest that no
one could have foreseen or prevented them. This report endeavors to expose the
facts, identify responsibility, unravel myths, and help us understand how the crisis
could have been avoided. It is an attempt to record history, not to rewrite it, nor allow
it to be rewritten.
To help our fellow citizens better understand this crisis and its causes, we also pres-
ent specific conclusions at the end of chapters in Parts III, IV, and V of this report.
The subject of this report is of no small consequence to this nation. The profound
events of  and  were neither bumps in the road nor an accentuated dip in
the financial and business cycles we have come to expect in a free market economic
system. This was a fundamental disruption—a financial upheaval, if you will—that
wreaked havoc in communities and neighborhoods across this country.
As this report goes to print, there are more than  million Americans who are
out of work, cannot find full-time work, or have given up looking for work. About
four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure and another four and a half
million have slipped into the foreclosure process or are seriously behind on their
mortgage payments. Nearly  trillion in household wealth has vanished, with re-
tirement accounts and life savings swept away. Businesses, large and small, have felt
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