Phil Angelides is something of a blast from the past in California politics, but since President Obama appointed him to head the investigation into the financial crisis, he’s been a busy guy.  The report came out yesterday, and is now available online.

So, what does the report say? Well, in short, banks disregarded or badly miscalculated risk.  Angelides, in radio interviews, alleges CEOs of actively disregarding risk.

Enabling those developments, the panel found, were a bias toward deregulation by government officials, and mismanagement by financiers who failed to perceive the risks.

The Fed, under Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan, failed to develop mortgage lending standards that could have stemmed the flow of bad mortgages into the financial pipeline, the panel found. “The Federal Reserve was clearly the steward of lending standards in this country,” said one commissioner, John W. Thompson, a technology executive. “They chose not to act.” (NY Times)

There really isn’t anything too shocking here. It is more a matter of scope than of any new knowledge. Unfortunately, the problem is that we haven’t really made the changes necessary to prevent a repeat.  However, the commission did [refer a few criminal complaint

The commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, said he hoped the report would help bear witness to a preventable catastrophe. “Some on Wall Street and Washington with a stake in the status quo may be tempted to wipe from memory this crisis or to suggest again that no one could have seen or prevented it,” he said.

But little on Wall Street has changed. One commissioner, Byron S. Georgiou, a Nevada lawyer, said the financial system was “not really very different” today from before the crisis.

“In fact, the concentration of financial assets in the largest commercial and investment banks is really significantly higher today than it was in the run-up to the crisis, as a result of the evisceration of some of the institutions, and the consolidation and merger of others into larger institutions,” he said. (NY Times)

The commission did refer a few criminal complaints to the DOJ, but whether there will be prosecutions is unclear.  The dissent wasn’t really all that different from the majority report, other than they were kind of pissed off by some of the rhetorical flourishes in the report.  At any rate, stay tuned to David Dayen at FDL form more on the FCIC report.