ABSTRACT
The ongoing financial crisis has raised troubling questions both for economists and for regulators. The former have had to explain why they apparently did not see the crisis coming2 while the latter, on both sides of the Atlantic, have had to explain why they were unable to prevent it from happening (Department of the Treasury2009; Turner 2009). There has been no shortage of suggested answers to these questions from a wide range of experts, observers, and commentators (Acharya and Richardson 2009).
