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I am coming up for air after the productive and engaging Inman Real Estate Connect conference last week. I got to connect (no surprise there) with a lot of great people connected with real estate and lead three panel discussions on foreclosure related topics.

One of the things I have been following has been the activity on this new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission or FCIC to those in the (alphabet soup) know.

Aside: kudos to the web designers for all the new dot-gov web sites such as recovery.gov. Simple to read and navigate. Yay!

FCIC.gov is something readers of Matrix should pay attention to.

Not because this effort will result in some sort of punishment for those who strayed from the straight and narrow (its a wide road). Since the financial crisis was a systemic breakdown, I would guess we will see something like this happen again in our lifetime, but hopefully not on the same scale because its human nature.

However, I recommend following this site to observe how the government will systemically explore what happened even though it was an important contributor to the breakdown. Sort of a government introspective while simultaneously protect their turf and save face. All the participants of this endeavor will no longer be in power when the next crisis hits. That’s why regulatory reform is so important.

My hope is something good comes out of the vetting process – it usually does – and we place logical constraints in place to prevent the scale of this sort of breakdown from happening in the future.

If its a slow evening for you, I recommend watching the C-SPAN versions of the January 13-14 hearings and review the associated documents.

Here are some sobering charts presented by the commission.

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