Financial Crisis and Response History

About a month ago, the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) published a 278 page document entitled “Crisis and Response: An FDIC History, 2008–2013.” It is a quite sanitized history compared to the excellent accounts of the crisis that came out many years ago (especially the books by Hank Paulson and Andrew Sorkin). Yet, I found that there was much of value in the FDIC book. There is of course a wealth of official and authoritative data, but there are also many interesting insights from the perspective of the regulators dealing with it in real time.

I wish Indian regulators could publish something similar about the various crises in Indian financial markets covering say 1990 to 2010 – the Harshad Mehta scam of 1992, the vanishing companies of 1995, the Ketan Parikh episode (especially the fate of the Calcutta Stock Exchange), the UTI Unit 64 bailout, Global Trust Bank, and Satyam. If the report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) in the US did not affect the ability of the FDIC to publish their history, there is no reason why the reports of the Joint Parliamentary Committees (JPCs) should be an obstacle for the Indian authorities (RBI/SEBI/MOF/MCA) to publish their accounts of these episodes.

Posted at 6:37 pm IST on Fri, 26 Jan 2018         permanent link

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