The claim has two components: (1) when banks are permitted to operate with fewer constraints, they engage in greedier/riskier behavior, and (2) the underlying driver is "human nature." On component 1 — lax regulation leads to riskier/greedier bank behavior — this is strongly supported. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) final report (January 2011) concluded that "more than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions" had "stripped away key safeguards" and that "too many of these institutions acted recklessly, taking on too much risk." The report noted compensation systems "too often rewarded the quick deal, the short-term gain—without proper consideration of long-term consequences." Academic research corroborates this: Di Maggio et al. (Management Science, 2019) found that deregulation led national banks to significantly increase origination of risky mortgages; Bisetti et al. (SSRN, 2019/2025) found that deregulation "played an important role in facilitating risk build-up" by pushing banks toward greater risk-taking. Igan et al. ("A Fistful of Dollars," Journal of Finance) documented that lenders who lobbied for lax regulation engaged in riskier lending ex ante and suffered worse outcomes ex post. On component 2 — the driver is "human nature" — this is more diffuse. The FCIC report itself framed the crisis in terms of "human nature and individual and societal responsibility," noting that "to pin this crisis on mortal flaws like greed and hubris would be simplistic. It was the failure to account for human weakness that is relevant to this crisis." This partially supports the claim's logic — human weaknesses (self-interest, short-termism) were real and needed to be constrained — while also cautioning that greed alone is an incomplete explanation. The broader academic literature identifies specific structural mechanisms: moral hazard from too-big-to-fail expectations, misaligned compensation incentives, regulatory capture, competitive dynamics, and cognitive biases (confirmation bias, overconfidence) rather than a generic "human nature." The CEPR column on "Why did the bankers behave so badly?" points to cognitive errors rooted in evolutionary psychology, which is closer to "human nature" but still more specific than the claim's framing. Overall: The claim's general structure — that banks, when unconstrained, tend toward greedy/risky behavior due to fundamental human tendencies — is well-supported by the weight of evidence from the FCIC and academic literature. However, the attribution to "human nature" as the causal driver is imprecise; the evidence points to specific incentive structures, competitive dynamics, and regulatory failures as the proximate mechanisms, with human tendencies (short-termism, overconfidence, self-interest) as underlying enablers. The FCIC itself warned that pinning the crisis on greed would be "simplistic." The claim is a reasonable but oversimplified rendering of a well-documented causal chain. Sources: - Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, "Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States" (January 2011), https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/historical/fct/fcic_report_final_20110127.pdf - Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani, Sanket Korgaonkar, "Partial Deregulation and Competition: Effects on Risky Mortgage Origination," Management Science (2019), https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3060 - Emilio Bisetti, Stephen A. Karolyi, Stefan Lewellen, "Deregulation, Market Structure, and the Evolution of U.S. Banking," SSRN (2019/2025), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3475458 - Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra, Thierry Tressel, "A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis," Journal of Finance, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/663992 - CEPR VoxEU column, "Why did the bankers behave so badly?", https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-did-bankers-behave-so-badly - Paul G. Mahoney, "Deregulation and the Subprime Crisis," Virginia Law Review (2018), https://virginialawreview.org/articles/deregulation-and-subprime-crisis/