Who caused the financial collapse? Just about everyone.
To appreciate this landmark work it is necessary to know a bit about the author’s background.
John Allison is not only a banker-entrepreneur; he is also a recognized intellectual leader of American business. Moreover, Allison’s financial expertise is a product of his personal biography: In a mere two decades, he built BB&T (Branch Banking & Trust Co.), a comparatively small Southern bank of $4.5 billion in assets, into a $152-billion financial enterprise, making it one of America’s largest and most profitable banks. But unlike many overpaid, underperforming CEOs, Allison focused his leader-manager skills—at modest compensation—on behalf of his employees, customers, and shareholders.
Briefly stated, Allison’s core principles begin with an unapologetic dedication to customer-oriented banking and carefully managed risk-taking as sound and effective means to long-term profitability and high returns on capital. BB&T deploys an uncommon means to sustain the bank’s dedicated corporate culture: continuous, serious, systemic employee education aimed at the formation of leaders, executives, and well-trained employees at every level. A core goal of every employee must be to focus on making every client profitable and successful on a risk-adjusted financial basis—that is, through conservative banking. False financial products were neither fabricated nor widely distributed during the bubble years (such products having been an important cause of the financial crisis). Monthly employee readings in philosophy and economics are mobilized to reinforce the core principles.
At the center of this banking philosophy is the development of the full potential of each employee, and each client, of the bank: This strategy, Allison argues, is the optimum path to shareholder, customer, and employee enrichment. Many firms pretend to such a strategy; Allison earned a national reputation because he actually carried it out, and successfully, in a banking system engaged during the bubble years in a “race to the bottom.”
In a free-market society, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of such a corporate culture. And in business, the individual conscience, dedicated to long-term rational self-interest, is the indispensable condition of a minimally regulated free market. It is striking that Allison’s strategy was vindicated by good returns on capital; it is equally striking that BB&T’s corporate culture was proven right in the financial crisis and Great Recession, as BB&T experienced not a single quarterly loss during the financial earthquake of 2007-2009.
It is necessary to know all this in order to understand the importance of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure. As the head of a major American bank, Allison was witness to the decisions of government, Federal Reserve leaders, and banking CEOs that led to a huge speculative bubble and the collapse of the financial system, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, virtually the entire cartel of big banks and brokers, and major companies. Allison guides us, with a gimlet eye, through taxpayer-subsidized bailouts of these wards of the state, focusing on a reckless, insolvent, privileged financial oligarchy—subsidized by a feckless Fed, a dilatory Treasury, and a politicized FDIC. The coercive power of the federal government, and the moral hazard of excessive regulation, is dissected and debunked.