This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 1st, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has issued its report,

fraught with politics.

Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute,

offers his initial thoughts.

The committee essentially split.

I mean all the Democrats supporting the overall report and all of the Republicans essentially dissenting.

And quite simply the findings of the report were largely markets run wild, regulators not doing

their jobs.

I mean that would be the bottom line of course the report finds lots of examples of

you know fraudulent behavior criminal behavior but for the most part the

bottom line of the majority part of the report would be

markets can't be trusted if we only had more regulation if regulators did their

were more aggressive, all this would have been avoided.

And what was the word from dissenters in offering their words?

They complained, the people who eventually dissented were complaining that a lot of the changes that they wanted included in the final document just weren't there.

And there was also a complaint that there wasn't much of a story. In one of the dissents, the phrase is used that an explanation that attributes everything as the

cause is something that explains nothing.

And that really is the case.

The report is almost a laundry list.

Credit default swaps, credit rate in agencies.

I mean, even the things in which, you know,

...