« Markets in everything?: Mexico edition | Main | Will the price of risk be too high or too low? »
What caused the financial crisis?
The column is titled "Three Trends and a Train Wreck." I attempt to explain the financial crisis in as simple and general terms as possible. Here is one paragraph:
Over all, then, the three fundamental factors behind the crisis have been new wealth, an added willingness to take risk and a blindness to new forms of systematic risk. All three were needed to bring about the scope of the current mess — so that means we’ve had some very bad luck on top of everything else.
I have about nine hundred words to flesh this out and to discuss Fischer Black as well; Black is a neglected but insightful macroeconomic theorist who starts with ideas from finance. Here is another paragraph:
Subprime loans collapsed first because those were the investments most dependent on relatively poor borrowers who were the most likely to fail. Since then, we’ve seen asset values fall throughout the economy. Subprime borrowing was the canary in the coal mine, but it was hardly the only problem. It now seems that a wide range of asset prices were artificially inflated. The market for contemporary art, which depends almost exclusively on very wealthy buyers, will probably be the last market to plummet but that development is almost certainly on its way.
One thing to keep in mind is how international the crisis has been; any explanation should start there. I wish in the column I had had space to discuss Spain, which has had relatively prudent banking regulation but still will have one of the biggest downturns in Europe. It is also worth considering Norway, Canada, and some of the other countries which limited their risk exposure all along. I mention Japan, but Brazil and Mexico also already have their banking crises behind them in the former decade and they too form other valuable points of comparison.
I am not sure I understand this Daniel Davies post, but it may have some overlap with my arguments.
Addendum: You might want to read this Jacob Weisberg column saying that the financial crisis refutes libertarianism. His paragraph starting with "There's enough blame to go around..." is exactly the foil I had in mind. His overall thesis is worth pondering but he doesn't once consider any cross-sectional variation across nations; such consideration wouldn't help his thesis. Am I allowed to say that the experience of Iceland refutes the small nation, social democratic model? Probably not, nor should I be.
Second addendum: Tim Harford has a humorous piece comparing the crisis to Monopoly the board game.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 19, 2008 at 08:00 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
It seems to me, that the nations most avoiding the collapse were ones who's banks already collapsed in the 90's, and then recovered after a short period of turmoil.
Posted by: Jorge Landivar at Oct 19, 2008 8:16:11 AM
I wish you could discuss Spain here. I'm living there and I don't think we're getting reliable information or analysis from the inside. I guess we're not living the worst consecuences of the financial crisis but I'm really worried about the real economy: jobs, public deficit, social services and so on.
Posted by: Marcos at Oct 19, 2008 8:53:46 AM
as a banker (in a very cautious group at a cautious firm), i am personally greatful that someone is finally making the it's-not-stupidity argument. imho it is impossible to make the 'banks were stupid' argument without also accepting one of the Gold Standard, fractional-reserve-banking-should-be-illegal, interest-is-sinful, or mattress-under-the-bed arguments too -- all of which involve the alleged stupidity of the government and not just of the banks.
now, some specific groups at specific firms _were_ stupid, but that is to be expected, and we had all better hope that there will be some stupid groups in the future, because if not, then our society will be poorer due to a societywide excessively high price of risk. an excessively high price of risk isn't as spectacularly catastrophic as the excessively low price of risk of the last 10 years, but compounded over time it can do just as much damage
Posted by: anoymouse at Oct 19, 2008 9:12:15 AM
One thing that I think gets left out is that it's not just a matter of understanding risk at the top of the management chain.
For any publicly held firm, if you can't persuade your shareholders that the risk is not worth the gains, you either join the risk takers or get kicked out. Given the difficulty of educating such a varied class (and that the indications of risk were fairly ambiguous), it was nigh impossible to avoid joining the risk-taking train even if there were severe doubts.
Certainly not joining the game rendered the Canadian banks almost insignificant on the world stage for decades, and there's still a distinct possibility that they'll end up wiped out anyway simply because the rest of the world's banking system is going down.
Where the big trends are concerned, caution rarely pays off. You don't get to partake of the spoils while the going is good, and if you even manage to survive being a "loser" for years and years (and most don't - ask the few financial advisers who were dubious of the tech boom), then you're likely to suffer the consequences anyway when the ride comes to an abrupt end...
Posted by: Tom West at Oct 19, 2008 9:41:42 AM
A better and simpler explanation comes from Anna Schwartz, interviewed yesterday in the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122428279231046053.html
Posted by: Greg Ransom at Oct 19, 2008 10:03:41 AM
I think that it has been reported that you reject the Austrian theory of the business cycle, but how do you rule out the massive injections of credit and money into system by the Fed and the banking system as a reason for the increase in price? We do not bury the money in mayo jars in back yards. We buy things with it. If the money/credit supply increases without a commensurate increase in goods and services, the money is used to bid up the price. Hemce, the bubbles.
Mises is right!
Travis
Posted by: Travis at Oct 19, 2008 10:34:12 AM
Well, since we're on the subject of what was done to quell speculative excess in the 1930s, the 800 lb gorilla in the room happens to be Bretton Woods. Why? What led to derivatives (recently rightly referred to in Congressional testimony as the latest incarnation of Bucket Shop practices) engulfing the world monetary system? It was none other than the end of the system of settling imbalance of trade among nations in gold. After the Nixon administration pulled the plug on this in 1971 the scene was set for a global casino of currency speculation. One bubble after another was created and blown out. Now we are at the point of either attempting insanely to further hypothecate our economies or to return to the Bretton Woods system of stability.
Posted by: Thingumbob at Oct 19, 2008 10:41:06 AM
The more a bubble affects assets across an economy (as opposed to just one asset), and the more rational the actors are on an individual level, the more it looks Misean to me. Housing has some institutional problems that make it (or made it) more bubble-prone than the rest of the economy.
Obviously we can't prevent bubbles no one can detect with any sort of political or economic system. What I'd like to know is, under what institutional and environmental conditions do actors who have knowledge of a bubble also have the incentives to take part in blowing the bubble up instead of trying to pop it? What incentives create massive, individually-rational ponzi-schemes and Keynesian beauty contests? Is the answer to that question a lot more complex than it seems?
Mises, Hayek, Garrison, etc. have done an excellent job of explaining why money isn't neutral (even if you think ABCT is a load of bunk I think you'd have to agree with them there), but as far as I know they haven't done much to explain the incentives behind ponzi-bubbles.
Posted by: Grant at Oct 19, 2008 10:55:30 AM
Tyler,
As your title implies, wrecks of trains, airplanes, finamcial systems, etc., occur whatever the trends. We therefore employ, signalmen, mainatenance staff, trained pilots, etc. to prevent and limit the malfunction that experience tells us is an ever-present risk. When a wreck occurs, the point at which we look for the critical failure is where it should have been prevented. In the financial system, that is the regulators. Anna Schwartz points to one way and one place where regulators did not do their job in this crisis. I think there were more. And the proof that they could have done their job is in Spain (where I am sitting now).
The apparent functions of financial regulatorsare three:
1. Keeping the possibilities of false markets, including fraudulent ones, to a minimum.
2. Preventing crises.
3. Preparing for recovery from such false markets and crises that do develop.
After this crisis, the western world’s financial regulators face a case to answer on all three functions. In outline, the charges are:
1. The regulators permitted dealing in new types of securities in which the allocation of risk between parties to the transactions was unclear; without signalling that there was reason to doubt the creditworthiness of these securities. Then they permitted regulated banks to transfer risk to “off-balance-sheet” entities without provision for the risks which remained with the banks. Third, they did little – too little – to assure themselves that the basic quality of lending underlying traded securities was maintained. In all these respects, very significant falsity was permitted in the markets.
2. There were many warnings that a crisis was likely, and ample evidence that leverage levels were such that a crisis was likely to prove severe. Little action was taken by most regulators to prevent one.
3. Over the past few years, regulators had done a good deal more than in the past to prepare for recovery from crises. They had thought through much of what needed to be done. That underlay the massive, prompt and unprecedented injections of liquidity that have been a feature of this crisis. They also were clear at the outset that massive recapitalisation of the banks was necessary. However, in Spring 2008 that recapitalisation stalled in the markets, half complete. The regulators took no further relevant action to secure recapitalisation until the full crisis of September/October.
That formidable list of charges does not mean that the regulators’ lacked powers or resources to discharge their functions. In Spain, country that was very much at risk from the collapse of a housing bubble, a regulator with no extraordinary powers did succeed surprisingly well in performing the first two functions. The Bank of Spain made its banks and savings banks both accumulate provisions against eventual losses in the ending of the real estate bubble, and provide 8% of capital if they wished to launch an off-balance-sheet vehicle. Further, they insisted that Spanish banks securitising loans remained liable for a portion of the risk, arguably minimising slide in loan quality. The result has been that the Spanish financial system has sailed through the international crisis with very little damage.
The sharp bout of trouble in the Spanish real economy remains (surely only the most foolish parts of Spanish politics thought it could be avoided). However it is being intensified by no more than weak refections of the international financial crisis, not by domestic financial disaster.
The lesson for those in much of the rest of the Western world looks simple. Our regulators could and should have avoided most of the financial crisis; but had we done so we would still be stuck with a lot of the real downturn.
Posted by: David Heigham at Oct 19, 2008 11:13:20 AM
"Most business-cycle analysts have very detailed scenarios for how things go wrong, but Mr. Black’s revolutionary idea was simply that we are not as shielded from a sudden dose of bad luck as we might like to think."I don't think this a fair explanation. Now I'm not too familiar with Black's work, but relying on "a sudden dose of bad luck" is like invoking a supernatural deity. It's an untestable hypothesis. And it's hardly worse than blaming a rout of optimism & pessimism for creating economic up- and downturns.
Posted by: kurt at Oct 19, 2008 11:25:27 AM
I think Tom West makes a good point that market pressures may force even cautious managers into excessive risk-taking.
There is lots of talk about the role lousy mortgages played in the crisis, and they are certainly part of the story, but I wonder if their importance is not somewhat overrated.
You can give out lousy mortgages, and resell them, without creating problems, as long as the pricing is accurate. (Of course for some the correct price is zero, or close to it. These mortgages should not have been made). After all, as some wealthy venture capitalists cn tell you, there is nothing wrong with making highly risky investments as long as the price makes sense and you finance them sensibly.
So I wonder if the complexity of the securities - even simple MBS aren't easy to value - combined with lack of transparent markets to help out, led to overreliance on models that mispriced the securities. Then excess greed kicked in - overleverage justified by model-bases prices created disaster when the defaults started.
Part of what I'm saying here is that even if the MBS in your portfolio are based on sound mortgages, if your pricing is off and you leverage way up to hold them, you're asking for trouble.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Oct 19, 2008 11:31:57 AM
Shorter D-squared:
Banks were acting rationally to the incentives in place, especially the credit expansion which was supposed to soften the landing of previous crashes.
Lots of smart people don't disagree with me, except for one[1].
[1] And he's a meanie.
Posted by: Anthony at Oct 19, 2008 12:08:41 PM
From the libertarian angle, one of the major functions of government is the prevention of fraud, and there was a tremendous amount of mortgage fraud (both by lenders and borrowers) which was just let run.
Posted by: Nancy Lebovitz at Oct 19, 2008 12:13:01 PM
I don’t know Jacob Weisberg’s intellectual pedigree, although I can guess; I do know this isn’t his first attempt to dismiss libertarianism. He wrote a different dismissal in 1997 that was something of a warning to the cognoscenti, instead of the current attempt at calumny masquerading as a eulogy. I think it’s fair to say he’s hostile to libertarianism and the free market and that antipathy is durable.
He writes with a certain logorrhea, perfect for Slate, since it is certainly among the most pretentious publications in either the electronic or paper realms. Anytime I’ve ever read it, I’ve been left with the feeling “why bother”, as my expectations of condescension and pseudo-intellectualism were aptly fulfilled by its predictably weary drivel of the type that typifies the conformist left. Of course much of the left’s publications are echo chambers and expectations of originality are irrational.
That having been said, I should also disclose that while I have libertarian impulses, I do not consider myself a libertarian now but find Cato a vehicle of originality.
However, what is important about this column is you can bet it represents a mindset that’s shared among the pseudo-intellectual left. In Weisberg’s world, libertarian advocacy of a free market has failed-despite the fact that investment and commercial banking have been and remain (despite all claims to the contrary) among the most highly regulated industries. Instead of addressing the idea of excessive or counterproductive regulation, he simply asserts that libertarians are “scurrying” around to promote the idea. Sure, he can dismiss the effects of the CRA with a simple assertion, but I’d like to see him talk about FDICIA or Sarbanes-Oxley. Chances are he’s never heard of the former law.
Sure its easy to let your words run wild and write meaningless phrases like “There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals.” and then simply assert, ex nihilo, “But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong.” Why go to the bother of attempting to resolve the validity of two divergent claims, when you’ve prejudged the matter.
For those libertarians out there that still have an open mind, you should think twice about casting your lot with the crown prince of the left. You may disagree with (some) on the right on the Patriot Act or something else, you won’t be called “intellectually immature”, nor will your entire ideology be summarily dismissed as “makes no sense”.
The left is what it always has been-the collective acting against the individual, generally to advance some nebulous “public good”. If advancing “sharing the wealth” which-will surely not be an abstraction, comports with your idea of advancing individual liberty, by all means-vote for Obama. More importantly, vote for a Democrat for the Senate, because we wouldn’t want his agenda to meet with any parliamentary inconveniences such as a filibuster. Surely, “sharing the wealth” will mean we’ll all get to dine on Iranian caviar like the presumptive first lady, no?
Posted by: Superheater at Oct 19, 2008 12:20:04 PM
The Weisberg piece is the second dumbest article I've ever read. He doesn't have a clue what libertarianism is. And his view that "deregulation" is at the heart of the problem is laughable. Why he has a forum in Slate (or Newsweek) is beyond me.
Oh, I forgot, they're run by libs, who are as uninformed as he is.
Charles Calomiris has a very good article about the panic on this weekend's WSJ op-ed page. Why Tyler links to Weisberg but not Calomiris (or Anna Schwartz's interview there) is a mystery.
Guess it's better to boom a stupid article bashing libertarians by an idiot who might cite you than to mention and link to an intelligent and well-informed interview or article by someone who never will do so.
(Anna Schwartz is 92; and Charles Calomiris works in a narrow field and forgot more about it than practically everyone else will ever know.)
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Oct 19, 2008 12:32:40 PM
Superheater,
Maybe you should edit your own comment before calling Weisberg pretentious and accusing him of logorrhea.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Oct 19, 2008 1:05:17 PM
1) Want both the best and most entertaining analysis of how the subprime mortgage disaster was caused . . . starting, earlier in this decade with a doubling of the global pool of hungry money looking for limited investments until it hit upon the financial innovations of subprime loans, which then were packaged together into MBS by Wall Street firms, turned into bonds, and sold in shares to investment groups world-wide --- then magnified by head-spinning leverage levels and shun-the-risk-insurance schemes and Credit Default Swaps and the like?
Go here to Ira Glass's hour NPR program.
Based on months of background work and astonishing interviews with mortgage brokers and bankers, top Wall Street packagers of their imaginary subprime assets, the computer whizards who ran their zonked-out programs based on default mortgage rates of the 1990s to show how sound the packaged CDO were, and the sellers and buyers of these pc-model-sanctioned MBS-pools turned into bonds and sold world-wide to investment groups clamoring --- yes, clamoring rabidly! like horny male and female rabbits left overnight in the same perfumed boudoir --- to give them more and more.
And by 2004, it turns out, there weren't enough even half-sound mortgages to satisfy the owners of these monetarized swamplands around the world.
….
The NPR link, by the way, above is to a shortened version on NPR. The full-hour program --- even more dumbfounding and a source of skyhooting mirth at human folly and greed --- can be linked to here
If you prefer a hard PDF copy, it's here.
......
2) A question prompts itself here that Glass's program answers. What caused the global pool of insatiable money looking for investments between 2000 and 2006 to reach interstellar levels in just six years?
In 2000, you see, that pool was $35 trillion . . . a figure that had taken centuries of economic growth to reach.
Six years later, it had soared to $75 trillion . . . far greater than the combined GDPs of all the countries world-wide ---- a mix of pension funds, insurance premium funds, cash-rich governments in oil-exporting countries, China's and Japan's Central banks, investment banks, hedge- and mutual funds and the like galore. Many of these can't-believe-how-much-dough-we-have financial groups and countries were poor a decade ago or, for the financial entities, non-existent. The rich countries imports of their oil and natural gas and goods-exports fueled their nouveaux-riches wealth, all hungry for some investment outlets.
……
3) The chain of avaricious lunacyunrivalled in world-history, it seems: at any rate, since the bad people didn't believe Noah and drowned in their orgies of self-absorption when the Big Flood began! --- is hard to credit until you hear the stories first hand in the extraordinarily canny interviews in the Glass program.
...
Among other things, the managers of these junk-laden mortgages that they gathered and sold to Wall Street as MBS couldn't find enough good mortgages to satisfy the hungry, buy-it-now! investment groups world-wide. One manager of a mortgage brokerage company in Nevada --- interviewed at length --- was a bar-man in 2003 when, with absolutely no experience in banking, he was hired to oversee a few dozen mortgage salesmen and buyers by an old established mortgage-firm.
His main qualification for the job? As an experienced bar-man with a glib tongue used to dealing with drunks, he inspired his team of scouring arm-twisting salesmen and buyers to get hold of any mortgage in Nevada no matter how junky it was and then sell them for a fee to money-drunk Wall Street types in $3000 suits.
.....
4) By late 2004, the high-octane clamor for new mortgages from the money pool-holders was so ear-splitting that house-buyers didn't have to show that they steady job, didn't have to prove they had any bank accounts, didn't --- come to that --- even have to provide a credit-rating.
There was only one minimal requirement: get hundreds of thousands of bucks in loans, the house-buyers had to be able to sign their names at the bottom of the mortgage-loans . . . after which, wham! they were then put together by the bar-man and sent on to Morgan Stanley and other more so-called sophisticated financial geniuses who put them all together into huge pools of MBS, then sold in shares (or whole) to bond-buyers world-wide.
...
5) As you'll see if you listen to Glass's program, the big driving cause of the financial pandemonium and crash wasn't t the crazy subprime-loans.
They were a reaction to the hungry pool of global money on the prowl, like hookers in Las Vegas, for outlets that would pay them for their efforts. More concretely, it was the financial systems world-wide that created the spinning, out-of-control explosion of mortgage-backed securities turned into repackaged CDOs in more complex derivative ways . . . with, by 2004 and 2005 --- to repeat ---all traditional credit-analysis of mortgage-loans went by the way-side, Glass's staff interviewing borrowers who had to show that they had neither a job, nor a bank account, nor even a credit-rating.
...
In Ohio, come to that, 23 of these borrowers didn’t even have to sign their names.
They resided in a cemetery, and the flim-flam brokerage contractors simply took their names, signed them to the loan-contracts, and sent them onto Wall Street for repackaging.
......
5) The Ira Glass program, please note, is the first in a series of about 4 or 5 programs . . . all based on extensive interviews, all easy to follow, and --- the extraordinary thing of it all --- by far the more illuminating account of the current financial crisis and panic-driven meltdown that you’ll find anywhere.
Compared to Glass and his chief producer and interviewers, economists and financiers of all stripes lag far, far behind in their tonified theory-driven accounts --- crammed with statistics and complex math formulas and told-you-so group-think defenses of their theoretical commitments --- of how self-delusion and delirious avarice combined to lead to financial and economic ruin on a global scale.
.......
Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor
Posted by: the buggy professor at Oct 19, 2008 1:17:05 PM
Science Fiction is full of the hidden dangers when humans place too much trust into systems they do not fully understand. Owners at too many institutions appear to have had a weak understanding of the firms they were operating. They placed their faith in something they didn't fully understand and did not adequately monitor.
My question is this like Katrina? i.e experts for years warned that a direct hurricane hit on New Orleans would have catastrophic consequences. This was not a big secret. Yet the safety measures taken were often superficial and inadequate to meet the potential challenge. Even residents of New Orleans, who should have been most aware of the potential consequences, discounted the risks.
Can the government prevent occasional severe hurricanes? No. Can they take steps to minimize the damage? Yes. But what is the optimal level of expenditures to protect against damaging storms? And can individuals do a better job of protecting assets then the government?
One of the problems with hurricane damage is the moral hazard of government bailouts. Residents in hurricane areas may take greater risks because they feel confident that the government will bail them out in the worst case scenario. We see to see some of the same risk with our current financial disaster, especially with regard to Fannie and Freddie.
I could go on with the analogy. But the point is many people knew that the financial system would be unable to withstand a direct hit. Safety measures were inadequate to deal with the risks, at least with the benefit of hindsight. Under pressure weaknesses became very obvious. Politicians had choices on how to prioritize government dollars, but they choose to emphasize politically advantageous expenditures over security.
Posted by: DanC at Oct 19, 2008 1:21:31 PM
Superheater,
Maybe you should edit your own comment before calling Weisberg pretentious and accusing him of logorrhea.
I'm not getting paid for my opinions. I'm just guy who happens to know vacant BS when I see it. Unlike most, if not all columnists for Slate, I actually have some experience with banking (as an external auditor).
At least I have the guts to offer an opinion other than a single line. But if you prefer Slate's ideological straightjacket, good for you.
Posted by: Superheater at Oct 19, 2008 1:46:22 PM
What most Brazilian readers probably want to hear is, following Jorge Landivar's comment, did the 1990s crisis make us safer now? I have to say, a lot of what is being done in rich countries now remind me of PROER, the Brazilian bank rescue program (which more or less worked, of course in a much less troubling setting).
Posted by: NPTO at Oct 19, 2008 1:59:26 PM
Aren't the "math jock" economists the ones who got us into this mess? Aren't the "rocket science" economists the ones who pioneered the new risk instruments? Isn't it the "idiot savant" math economists who are the ones who continually mis-specify the logic of risk?
In other words, in this present crisis, the mathematical "economics" of risk is not the solution to our problem; mathematical "economics" of risk IS the problem.
The economists have a lot to answer for in the present crisis. And almost none of you are fessing up.
Posted by: Greg Ransom at Oct 19, 2008 2:05:25 PM
The history of Govt intervention and the vast banking regulatory apparatus are responsible for this crisis. Ask yourself, when did you last see a bank competing for your deposits on the basis of the safety of the bank, and how safe it's investments were. You would have thought that would be the first thing on the mind of any depositor, after all the interest rate paid by a bank is not high enough to bear much risk, so most people use banks for money they want to keep safe. But you never (or very rarely) see a bank promoting the fact that they don't invest your deposits in anything (for instance) more racy than treasuries. The reality most people are convinced that banks will not be allowed to fail, and they are right it seems. So risky bank behaviour is ignored by depositors, instead of being punished. Banks would be competed out of business if they followed a low risk strategy given this environment. So frequent bank crashes (with state rescues) are to be expected.
Posted by: ChrisA at Oct 19, 2008 2:15:52 PM
The "rocket science" of financial risk just blew up on the launching pad, didn't it?
Posted by: PrestoPundit at Oct 19, 2008 2:48:23 PM
Tyler, what you are not telling your readers is that a key to the new risk undertaken on Wall Street was the new "rocket scientist" developed computerized math of "risk" -- i.e. a good part of the blame falls directly on the economists, and their bogus "science" of risk, as operationalized on Wall Street. Bad science in --> bad financial management out.
The NY Times had a good piece on this not so long ago.
Wondering why you failed to finger this key player in the current crisis -- your peers and their bogus "science" of economic risk. It was bad science from the point of view of the logic of probability, and from the point of view of the real world economics of the coordination of individual plans through time.
But is made for easy to grade "he's really smart" advanced course work tests, so popular with economic professors.
You wrote:
"We can do better the next time around, but we have to start by seeing that the current failure is far-reaching and that we can blame many different things and many different people.
The real problem is not some particular villain but rather the very fact that we cannot help but put the evaluation of risk into all-too-human hands."
Posted by: Greg Ransom at Oct 19, 2008 3:05:43 PM
The regulators have prevented 9 of the last 5 future crises.
"With hindsight, it is easy to argue that regulation should have done more, but in most countries, governments were happy about rising real estate and asset prices and didn’t seek to slow down those basic trends."
I suppose most people think that leaders in a democracy can be ahead of the curve and ahead of people, and maybe I used to think so too, but at this point, I don't even understand where those people are coming from.
As for Weisberg, the same people that make up the market make up the electorate. The situation proves nothing about libertarianism except that a government that shows that it believes itself omnipotent yet again didn't prevent a damn thing.
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 19, 2008 4:06:27 PM