Ross Levine (born April 16, 1960) is an American economist who currently holds the Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance at the University of California at Berkeley.
In February 2010, he debated the merits of financial innovation with Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in an online series for The Economist.
He found that while financial institutions played a major role in the system's collapse, regulatory policies during the period from 1996 to 2006 also contributed to the crisis.
[7] The evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis.
The policies incentivized financial institutions to engage in activities that generated enormous short-run profits but dramatically increased long-run fragility.