The report warns that the country is now immersed in a "doomsday cycle" wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management -- and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.
"Risk-taking at banks," the report cautions, "will soon be larger than ever."
Without more stringent reforms, "another crisis -- a bigger crisis that weakens both our financial sector and our larger economy -- is more than predictable, it is inevitable," Johnson says in the report, commissioned by the nonpartisan Roosevelt Institute.
The institute's chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, calls the report "an important point of departure for a debate on where we are on the road to regulatory reform."
The report blasts some of Washington's key players. Johnson writes, "Our government leaders have shown little capacity to fix the flaws in our market system." Two other panelists, Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT, and Peter Boone of the Centre for Economic Performance, voiced similar criticisms.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "oversaw policy as the bubble was inflating," write Johnson and Boone, and "these same men are now designing our 'rescue.'"
The study says that "In 2008-09, we came remarkably close to another Great Depression. Next time we may not be so 'lucky.' The threat of the doomsday cycle remains strong and growing," they say. "What will happen when the next shock hits? We may be nearing the stage where the answer will be -- just as it was in the Great Depression -- a calamitous global collapse."
