ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at understanding the current financial crisis in the United States and around the world. We ask, and attempt to answer, two questions: (1) how could the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and countless others maintain for so long faith in a political ideology – deregulation – that had created so many negative outcomes since the 1980s; and (2) how could the ideology of deregulation so completely ignore the foibles of human nature that so often generate illogical, unrealistic and irrational outcomes such as Enron, WorldCom and Tyco – financial catastrophes and mismanagement that led to the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley legislation?
