We believe a critical opportunity was missed when the balance of the burden of adjustment was tilted heavily in favor of creditors relative to debtors in the response to the crisis and that this contributed to the prolonged stagnation that followed the crisis. The long-term social and political ramifications of this missed opportunity have been profound.

Back in September 2008, when then-US Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson introduced the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), he proposed using the funds to bail out the banks, but without acquiring any equity ownership in them. At that time, we and our colleague Robert Dugger argued that a much more effective and fair use of taxpayers' money would be to reduce the value of mortgages held by ordinary Americans to reflect the decline in home prices and to inject capital into the financial institutions that would become undercapitalized. Because equity could support a balance sheet that would have been 20 times larger, $700 billion could have gone a long way toward restoring a healthy financial system. [...]

No doubt the Obama administration helped to alleviate the crisis by reassuring the public and downplaying the depth of the problems, but there was a heavy political price to pay. The administration's policies failed to deal with the underlying problems, and by protecting the banks rather than mortgage holders, they exacerbated the gap between America's haves and have-nots.