“Six years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the lessons of the financial crisis may already be fading from collective memory.
Just last week:
- Congress acted to loosen the regulation of the high-risk investments that ignited the 2008 crisis.
- Housing regulators cut minimum down payments on home loans.
- The Institute of International Finance declared it "worrisome" that global indebtedness, as a share of world economic output, has reached record levels.
All this comes as subprime auto loans for financially stretched buyers are surging. And the so-called too-big-to-fail banks that needed a taxpayer bailout in 2008 now loom even larger than before the crisis: America's five biggest banks account for 44 percent of bank assets, up from 38 percent in 2007, according to SNL Financial.
The trend toward pre-crisis lending practices worries analysts who favored far-reaching reforms to safeguard the system.
"We're on a very dangerous trajectory," said Simon Johnson, professor of global economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
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