Abstract: The fi rst de cade of the twenty- fi rst century concluded, and the second de cade began, with the United States having experienced one of the worst economic upheavals in its history as well as one of the worst environmental disasters in its history. These calamities, combined with a series of other major industrial accidents as well as a deep recession and sluggish economic recovery, have cast grave doubts over the adequacy of the nation’s regulatory system. In the wake of each calamity, politicians and members of the public have attributed much of the blame to a general breakdown in the U.S. regulatory system. 1 The various investigative reports that followed the century’s early disasters, for example, only reinforced this view of systemic regulatory failure: • In response to the subprime mortgage crisis that started in late 2007, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s majority report accused federal regulators of “pervasive permissiveness.” The report’s authors argued that “little meaningful action was taken to quell . . . threats in a timely manner,” singling out “the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the fl ow of toxic mortgages . . . by setting prudent mortgagelending standards” (National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States 2011:xvii). 2 • Six months after the 2010 explosion on the BP- leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed eleven crew members and caused nearly fi ve million barrels of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico, the federal investigating commission pointed to “de cades of inadequate regulation”
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-12-31
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 10
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