A recent Bank of England Staff Working paperiv noted the following as contributing factors to the global financial crisis:   Inadequate or flawed regulation, supervision or both;    Underestimation of the riskiness of securities created with financial engineering;    Bad incentives;    Excessive funding of long term assets with short-term liabilities;    Ratings agencies failures;    Flawed assumptions regarding house prices;    Elevated household debt;    A belief by bankers that their institutions were too big to fail;    Global imbalances;    Financial assets accounting; and    Too loose monetary policy.
It is a long list! Across the globe, “financial innovation….vastly outpaced regulation and supervision…. Financial institutions went on a frenzy of reckless risk-taking…. [relying] more on short-term funding, dramatically lowering lending standardsv.”  The Banking Crisis – A Decade On  Many of these failures are clearly relevant to the catastrophic impacts of the financial crisis in Ireland too.