The claim "The bankers were allowed to crash the global economy" asserts a causal link: regulatory failures and deregulation (the "allowing") permitted bankers to engage in reckless behavior that produced the 2008 global financial crisis (the "crash"). The evidence strongly supports this causal link. The most authoritative source — the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), established by Congress to investigate the crisis — concluded that "widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation's financial markets" and that "more than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions… had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe." The FCIC also found that "dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management at many systemically important financial institutions were a key cause of this crisis" and that regulators "had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it." The commission explicitly concluded the crisis was "avoidable" and "the result of human action and inaction." Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in testimony to the FCIC, identified both regulatory gaps and private-sector risk management failures as causes, noting that shadow banks and other financial entities were "not subject to consistent and effective regulatory oversight." Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote that "the main cause of the crisis was the behavior of the banks—largely a result of misguided incentives unrestrained by good regulation." On the UK side, Gordon Brown himself admitted he made a "big mistake" in establishing the FSA's regulatory framework, acknowledging that he "didn't understand just how entangled things were." The FSA's own chairman, Lord Turner, testified that political pressure for "light-touch regulation" from Brown's government had contributed to the banking crisis. The claim is a simplification — the crisis had multiple interacting causes including housing bubbles, low interest rates, global imbalances, and flawed credit ratings — and the specific role of Glass-Steagall's repeal is debated (some argue it was a contributing factor, others like former Fed Vice Chairman Blinder argue no bad practice would have been prevented by its retention). But the core assertion — that bankers were permitted through regulatory failures and deregulation to engage in behavior that crashed the global economy — is well-established by the official inquiry, expert consensus, and the admissions of key figures involved. Sources: - Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) Report, U.S. Government Publishing Office: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf - Ben Bernanke, "Causes of the Recent Financial and Economic Crisis," Federal Reserve Board testimony: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/testimony/bernanke20100902a.htm - Joseph Stiglitz, "The Main Cause of the Crisis Was the Behavior of the Banks," FCIC testimony: https://fcic-static.law.stanford.edu/cdn_media/fcic-testimony/2009-1020-Stiglitz-article.pdf - BBC News, "Gordon Brown admits 'big mistake' over banking crisis": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13032013 - The Telegraph, "Gordon Brown helped fuel banking crisis — FSA head": https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/4808373/Gordon-Brown-helped-fuel-banking-crisis-FSA-head.html - NPR, "Fact Check: Did Glass-Steagall Cause The 2008 Financial Crisis?": https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/14/448685233/fact-check-did-glass-steagall-cause-the-2008-financial-crisis - Congressional Research Service, "The Glass-Steagall Act: A Legal and Policy Analysis": https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R44349/R44349.3.pdf