Investors, bankers, regulators: who is responsible for the financial crisis? The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (http://fcic.law.stanford.edu/report) underestimated the role of investors and focused too much on 'financial institutions' and 'regulators.' The commission's minority, or 'dissenting,' report only partially resolved the imbalance as it blamed investors for creating a 'credit bubble'...

The financial crisis shows that politics and finance are connected and 'political economy' (PE) is back in focus, providing a framework for viewing finance from a political perspective. The problem is the term is hard to define as academics have used it in a variety of ways. The idea of...