And by “fourteen” we mean “more than fourteen” because each “question” is more like “a bunch of questions” or in some cases “stuff that Gorton and Metrick wonder about but have not actually stated in the form of a question”.

Anyways, we bolded the main bits from each below, and you can find the full paper via NBER

Most of them are about the factors that made the crisis and subsequent recession so profound and enduring — excess leverage, deregulation, lax lending standards, the rise of securitisation, blindness of the rating agencies, fraudulent bankers — but very few of them are about what actually started the crisis.

(Update: He’s also, as our commenters point out, the man behind some of the AIG’s risk-management models. Take that as you will, we still think there are some interesting insights in the paper.)

The call money market was the “shadow money” of its day — and lending terms almost always tightened when the underlying collateral was in a bear market, and usually eased remarkably quickly once it was over.