When you've read this post, submit your own questions for the bankers appearing at tomorrow's hearing. We'll be collecting your ideas and featuring them prominently in the next few days.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) is holding its first public hearings and will hear testimony from the CEOs of some of the largest financial institutions. This is not the hearing at which experienced investigators would produce fireworks. The FCIC has not used subpoena authority or voluntary requests for information to obtain the background information essential in order to hold a real investigative hearing. In particular, it has not obtained AIG (and Fannie and Freddie's) emails and other critical internal documents such as their financial models, internal accounting records, and loss reserve data that are readily available and vital to understand what caused the crisis. Any aircraft crash investigator knows how critical it is to find the "black box" that records the information that is typically essential to finding the cause. In the financial context, these AIG, Fannie & Freddie emails and internal accounting and risk records are the "black box" that any competent investigator would demand to review.

FCIC should use this first public hearing for two quiet purposes. The primary goal should be to develop information. The subsidiary goal is to put the CEOs on record as to what went catastrophically wrong, which will allow the FCIC to judge their candor as the facts are developed. The FCIC, and the nation, need the utmost candor. The CEOs must testify under oath, as is the norm now for witnesses testifying before the House Financial Services Committee. Precisely because it is the norm it does not impute any wrongdoing to any witness.

The primary goal is gathering information because that is what the FCIC needs and that is what the CEOs can provide at the hearing and, more importantly, in response to requests for information that the FCIC should make at the hearing. The CEOs have expertise, access to all information on the facts critical to understanding the crisis, the analyses their firms' have conducted or received on the causes of the Great Recession, and the steps their officers, firms, and other entities took (or failed to take) in response to those analyses. Those analyses are critical both for what they will reveal directly (what did they know and when did they know it?) but perhaps more importantly what they will reveal that the largest (surviving) financial institutions did not know or understand as the crisis was developing. For example, if the financial institutions did not conduct urgent analyses in response to the FBI's September 2004 warning that an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud was developing that would cause a financial "crisis" if it were not contained and/or did not act on those analyses to change their operations that non-action would be one of the primary contributors to the Great Recession.

We suggest specific questions below, but our overall recommendation to FCIC for this initial hearing can be stated succinctly: the FCIC should enlist the financial industry as its research assistants. The industry should jump at the chance. Now, we are not naïve and the FCIC must not be naïve. The industry is self-interested. It has performed abysmally, sometimes criminally. It rightly fears that exposure of its emails, data, analyses, and actions (and failures to act) to the public will expose it to criminal prosecutions, administrative enforcement actions, civil suits, and well-deserved ridicule. The CEOs' most salient fears are that disclosure of the information will demonstrate that the massive bonuses paid to them and their officers were paid improperly (because they were based on phony accounting) and should be "clawed back" and that many senior officials should be fired. Tough. The only way to reduce the frequency and damage of future crises is to find out what caused this one. So FCIC must insist on total disclosures by these firms -- no selective release of analyses that make the senior officers look good or were written to try to justify bonuses or help the lawyers defend the officers. It all must come out -- and it must do so promptly. FCIC, and the nation, need to know now whether the firms are unwilling to provide all the analyses and underlying facts that FCIC needs to fulfill its statutory duty. If they are not willing to do so then the nation needs to know whether FCIC has the guts and integrity to use its subpoena authority immediately to obtain the information.

For the sake of brevity in the questions below we have not repeated each time the critical specific details (who, when, how?) any competent investigator would need to ask in the formal request for information in order to learn the specifics and identify the essential documents.

Here are our top ten questions:

1. AIG: What was your firm's relationship with AIG? How much exposure did you have to AIG? What information did you publicly disclose about that exposure? Did you think AIG's CDS strategy was "good business"? Do you think we still would have needed to rescue AIG if its derivatives had been centrally cleared, as some in Congress have proposed?

2. Disclosure: Were your financial statements during 2005-08 accurate? What did your officers disclose to your board about your bank's exposure to the nonprime mortgage markets before 2008? What specific information did you publicly disclose about your exposure to derivatives and nonprime mortgages? When did officers or employees of your firm recognize that there was a serious risk of a housing bubble? What did they recommend, and what changes did the firm implement, in response to the identification of this risk? Why?

3. Pay: What was your bank's total compensation for officers for each year from 2001 to the present? What were the components of that compensation? Identify and explain where compensation created perverse incentives in the following contexts: your bank, other banks, executive compensation advisory firms, audit firms, appraisers, rating agencies, loan brokers, loan officers? What aspects of compensation produced these perverse incentives? When did employees of your bank become aware of the literature in economics, criminology, and compensation warning of these perverse incentives? What specific actions did the bank take in response? Which elements of your bank's compensation system create perverse incentives?

4. Ratings: Why do you think the rating agencies gave AAA ratings to toxic CDOs? Did you think CDO credit ratings accurately reflected their credit worthiness? Did employees of your bank ever express concerns internally/publicly about the judgment of the ratings agencies? If so, when was the first time?

5. Moral hazard: What incentives at your institution helped lead to the financial crisis? What conversations did you have with the Fed regarding your exposure to CDS and other derivatives? What monetary value would you place on the government guarantee of your deposits?

6. Mortgage fraud: Name the three nonprime specialty lenders with the worst reputations for originating fraudulent mortgages. Name the three nonprime specialty lenders with the worst reputations for originating predatory loans. Is there any legitimate business reason why a secured lender would seek to induce appraisers to inflate the value of the secured property? When did employees of your bank become aware that coercion of appraisers to inflate appraised values was becoming common? What action did they take or recommend when they became aware?

7. Warnings: What were the three most significant specific steps your banks took in response to the FBI's September 2004 warning that the developing "epidemic" of mortgage fraud would produce a crisis if it were not stemmed? Why do you think the spread on nonprime mortgages fell after this warning, and other warnings? Why did bank loss reserves also fall during this time? What were your bank's analyses of these risks and the adequacy of loss reserves (industry-wide and at your bank) and how did they change as the markets exhibited these perverse patterns? What did your bank's officers recommend that the bank do in response to these perverse market conditions and what actions did the bank actually take? Were the industry reactions, and your bank's reactions, to the warnings adequate?

8. Lobbying: How much has your bank spent on lobbying over the last five years? This year? How many additional personnel has your bank hired full-time or as consultants to lobby the federal government?

9. Crimes: How many criminal referrals has your bank made for mortgage-related frauds in each year beginning in 2002? How many named your own officers or employees? Does the FBI have adequate resources to investigate such frauds? Explain how an epidemic of mortgage fraud must lead to widespread accounting and securities fraud if the mortgage paper is to be resold.

10. Regulation: Did the passage of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 contribute to the crisis? Did the federal regulators' efforts to preempt state regulation of predatory mortgage lenders contribute to the crisis? Should the Federal Reserve have used its authority under HOEPA to regulate nonprime lending during the financial bubble? Provide any contemporaneous analyses of the role of regulation, deregulation, and desupervision in contributing to the crisis. Did your bank lobby (directly or indirectly through trade associations) in support of deregulatory efforts that contributed to the crisis?

**HAVE A QUESTION FOR A BANKER? LEAVE YOUR QUESTION IN THE COMMENT FIELD BELOW!

Eliot Spitzer is a former attorney general and governor of New York. Frank Partnoy is a professor of law at the University of San Diego and the best-selling author of The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals, about the 1920s markets and Ivar Kreuger, who many consider the father of modern financial schemes. William Black is Roosevelt Institute Braintruster and a former investigator of the S&L crisis and a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.

Tom Ferguson urges the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to question Eric Holder on AIG.

Is there anyone out there who still expects anything from the Angelides Commission? After AIG? After TARP? After Treasury's gargantuan tax breaks for banks, Geithner's preposterous asset buying program, the Citigroup $300 billion plus "ring fence," or the FDIC's guarantees of bank debts? Or, for that matter, the proposed new financial "reform" legislation that does little to rein in "too big to fail" banks and their long deadly chains of derivatives and credit default swaps?

Probably not. But since the Commission is finally holding its first hearings this week, let's just for a moment suspend disbelief and imagine how we skeptics might be proved wrong.

One telltale sign will come right at the start: Are the bankers who are testifying required to do so under oath or not? If the answer is no, relax and go see a disaster movie. You can be sure that it will all be just for show.

Assume, though, that the Commission passes that test. Today several of my gifted colleagues are proffering advice on what the bankers should be asked if the Commission wants to be taken seriously. I am as curious as anyone to hear how Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein defends "God's work." But let's also focus on someone else who will be testifying right after them: Attorney General Eric Holder.

Mr. Holder's position is unique. He heads the Department of Justice. As such, he doesn't exercise direct regulatory responsibility over financial markets in the way that the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or the Securities and Exchange Commission do. But he is the nation's top law enforcement official, so it makes sense to ask him some pointed questions, especially about AIG.

In August 2009, the New York Times reported that in the wake of the market panic triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had asked for an ethics waiver that would allow him to talk to his old colleagues at Goldman Sachs. According to the Times, Mr. Paulson received two waivers on September 17: one from the White House counsel's office and one from the Treasury. But the Times also reported that according to Mr. Paulson's calendar, which it said it had obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the Secretary didn't wait for the waiver before commencing his now famous series of calls back and forth with Lloyd Blankfein. Paulson telephoned him at least twice before the waiver arrived and many more times thereafter.

Yes, it was a crisis, and Paulson needed no waiver to speak with Blankfein about bland topics such as market conditions. But given the endless controversy about how AIG's rescue aided Goldman Sachs, Holder should be asked if he has reviewed the circumstances of the waiver, and what his views on it are. He should also be asked about any later memoranda or correspondence about the waiver.

More importantly, though, according to the Times, the calendar shows only official calls from Paulson's office. It does not record calls from Paulson's cell phone or from his home phone. Mr. Holder should be asked explicitly if the Department of Justice has obtained a full list of calls made from the other telephones. He should also be asked to make the list public.

As Attorney General, Mr. Holder is the authority on implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. In other circumstances, he has, like President Obama, touted the virtues of transparency and the timely release of information to the public. And, to be sure, the administration's FOIA policies represent an improvement over the icy hostility of the Bush-Cheney administration.

In September 2008, Harper's Magazine formally asked the Justice Department to release the same calendar that the Times said it already had obtained. Treasury claimed in October that it needed more time to consider the request. It has not responded further. The Treasury has also stonewalled Harper's request for an accounting of the other telephone calls. Mr. Holder should be asked how long he thinks Treasury can reasonably delay answering such simple requests and how he conceives of his responsibility in such matters. Needless to say, the Commission itself must demand all those records and make them public, by subpoena if necessary. There is no issue here of national security-and the recent disclosure that the New York Fed told AIG not to disclose the identity of the banks receiving full payment on their credit default swaps with AIG only fuels the worst possible suspicions.

Finally, of course, the Attorney General needs to be asked who in the Justice Department is reviewing the rest of the tangled chain of emails, memos, and phone conversations that stretched between Wall Street, the Fed, Treasury, and the White House during the period of the bailouts, including those engineered by Mr. Geithner after he relocated from the New York Fed to the Treasury. The Attorney General should be asked to make all such material available to the Commission and the Commission should undertake to publish all of it online. If it does, the Commission would really live up to its billing as a "new Pecora Commission." If it backs down, well then, so much for the audacity of hope. We'll know we were had -- again.

Thomas Ferguson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; a member of the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the coauthor, with Robert Johnson, of a two part series on the financial crisis that has just appeared in successive issues of the International Journal of Political Economy.

Will 2010 be the year of the woman? We asked prominent thinkers to discuss women's changing roles in the economy. How has the crisis affected them? Are women the key to reform? What economic impact will they have going forward? We'll explore all this and more in a special ND20 12-part series. Maya Wiley argues for focusing on the needs of women of color as a bellwether for the overall economy.

We all need jobs: men and women, people of all races, ages and physical abilities. So it's welcome news that recent jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that we only lost 11,000 jobs -- not the 135,000 we thought we'd lose. And these numbers also tell us that we have a lot more to do to ensure that all who should work can work. To do that, we must make sure that we add the jobs to the economy that we all need. So why talk about women and why talk about women and race?

Talking about women and race will help focus us on where our economy is very broken. Men have lost jobs faster than women. Men need jobs. But most job creation has been in male-dominated industries like construction. Women of all races, and black men too, are grossly under-represented in construction jobs.

According to 2008 Department of Labor data, women are almost 60 percent of the US labor force -- working or looking for work. But women also earn only about 80% of what men earn. And women of color are faring worse than white women. When we at the Center for Social Inclusion crunched the numbers, we found that unemployment has also risen faster for young women of color than for white women in the same age range. Unemployment among young black women has increased by 8.6% to 20.4%. Today, 14.6% of Latina women in that age category are unemployed -- an increase of 7.2% since the start of the recession. Age matters, too. Young, white women are doing as poorly as their young male counterparts -- unemployment has risen 6.2% to 11%.

Another reason to pay attention to women's needs in this recession? In a word: poverty. The poverty rate for black women is 26.2%, and it's 25.5% for Latina women -- more than 4 times higher than the white male poverty rate. And it is not surprising that children are the collateral damage when we fail address the unemployment and poor pay that is behind these numbers. Even in a recession, it is shocking that 30.6% of Latino children, 33.9% of Black children, 15.8% of white children, and 13.3% of Asian children live in poverty.

A democracy needs a democratic economy. That means that we invest our public dollars in our people so that we all can participate in the economy. Our economy is a set of relationships - childcare, health care, transportation, education and networks. Investing in childcare, access to education -- particularly higher education - and in critical infrastructure like broadband and public transit that connects excluded communities to job opportunities and job centers, can ensure that our economy and our nation work. The White House is on the right track when it looks to reform health care, invest in infrastructure and fix financial institutions. But neutral decisions will mean that women, particularly women of color, will probably not have the same opportunities. Collecting data by race and gender, understanding where investments are low and unemployment is high, and removing the barriers the excluded face will produce a stronger nation.

Maya Wiley is executive director of the Center for Social Inclusion.

Bill Black explains how Bo Cutter's defense of Tim Geithner reveals the  fraud and failure that plagued the financial sector  long before the crisis.

Bo Cutter has presented the best possible defense of Treasury Secretary Geithner.

It is a remarkable defense because it is premised on a scathing indictment of Wall Street, theoclassical economics, modern finance, and the sycophants that the financial community installed as anti-regulators. Indeed, Bo's account is sometimes particularly credible because it is a confession. Bo was a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm and led President Obama's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. His defense of Geithner provides so rich a vein of ore that I will mine it in three installments: (1) Bo's indictment of the finance industry, Greenspan, Geithner, Paulson and Bernanke, (2) the martyrdom of Geithner, and (3) Geithner as Bo's Last Action Hero.

Bo's explanation of Geithner's unique virtues begins the indictment.

It comes down to this: the combination of brains, guts, calmness, and a willingness to act are virtually non-existent in Washington in any era, but particularly in this one. When you find the combination in a significant cabinet level job, you should value it.

[T]his crisis was long in coming and it was a totally integrated failure of intellectual traditions, global macro-economic imbalances, government policy making, regulatory supervision, financial sector greed, incomprehensible boards of directors, absences without leave, and breath-taking management short-sightedness. No one and no institution put together an understanding of the set of factors that triggered this particular debacle. Tim [Geithner] is included in this "no one", but so is everyone else.

I think the last two years have revealed the single largest failure of senior management in the financial sector, and of the board system in American history. I think I am correct in saying that there was not a single independent director in America who stood up on this issue. I do not understand why every board of every institution that failed was not asked to resign immediately.

Bo's indictment is compelling, but his logic proves a deeper failure. There is no reason to restrict his indictment to "the last two years." The senior managers' and directors' failure did not begin with the recession. They failed throughout the expansion of the bubble, the backdating of stock options, after-hours trading, the collapse of the auction rate securities market, the "epidemic" of mortgage fraud by lenders, the massive scandals of the Enron and Worldcom era, and the savings and loan debacle. The financial sector has been in recurrent, intensifying scandals for decades.

Bo's arguments require us to focus on at least the last four years (even if he continues to ignore the FBI's 1984 warning that the mortgage fraud "epidemic" would cause a crisis).

In fact, by 2006 and early 2007 everyone thought we were headed to a cliff, but no one knew when or what the triggering mechanism would be. The capital market experts I was listening to all thought the banks were going crazy, and that the terms of major loans being offered by the banks were nuttiness of epic proportions.

By early 2006 -- roughly four years ago -- "everyone" agreed "we were headed to a cliff" and that the banks' "major loans" were "nuttiness of epic proportions." An industry whose claimed expertise is the sophisticated evaluation of risk and value universally failed to come remotely close to valuing either. As Bo emphasizes, these were massive errors. These managers got immensely wealthy because -- not despite -- their willingness to make hundreds of thousands of loans that were certain to crash and burn as soon as the bubble ceased to inflate (which it did in 2006). Bo knows them, and Bo says that every independent (sic) director betrayed their fiduciary duties to shareholders. Every senior officer at the major banks failed. Bo portrays them as incompetents, cowards, and moral failures.

Bo's indictment of his finance peers is even more severe than his portrayal. White-collar criminologists have shown that the lending pattern he describes ("nuttiness of epic proportions" when "everyone" agrees "we were headed to a cliff") demonstrates that the lenders are frauds that have produced an epidemic of accounting "control fraud" (where the persons controlling a seemingly legitimate organization use it as a "weapon"). The FBI began publicly warning of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud in September 2004, with 80% of the losses occurring when lender personnel were involved in the fraud. The number of criminal referrals for mortgage fraud indicates an annual rate of mortgage fraud in the many hundreds of thousands. The recipe for a lender optimizing accounting control fraud is: (A) grow extremely rapidly, (B) make extremely bad loans, (C) have extreme leverage, and (D) provide minimal loss reserves. (The first two ingredients are related. In a mature product like home mortgages, the optimal way to grow extremely rapidly while increasing yield is to make loans to individuals that cannot repay the loans. The rapidly expanding bubble allows fraudulent lenders to postpone loss recognition by refinancing the bad loans.) Nonprime specialty lenders followed this recipe. The pattern produces guaranteed record accounting profits in the short-term. Because a significant number of lenders follow the same strategy, the result was a hyper-inflated financial bubble followed by an economic crisis.

The accounting fraud optimization pattern that a lender follows, however, creates two weaknesses that we exploited as S&L regulators during the debacle. The lender must gut its loan underwriting standards and suborn its internal controls. Secured lenders must encourage inflated appraisals. Officers must be disciplined for rejecting bad loans and given bonuses for making bad loans. No honest lender would follow such suicidal practices. Bank examiners can easily, quickly, and precisely identify these perversions of honest, normal underwriting practices. We made closing such lenders our top priority -- while they were still reporting record profits and minimal losses (See: The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One). The economists and lawyers thought that this proved we were insane because they were clueless about accounting fraud. The second weakness is that optimizing accounting fraud requires extremely rapid growth. This provided a quick screening device for identifying likely frauds and a means to force their rapid collapse -- by restricting their growth. Regulators could have targeted these same weaknesses and contained the ongoing crisis. Instead, despite the FBI's early warnings about the fraud epidemic, they functioned as anti-regulators. The FBI has put the matter starkly: it is "irresponsible" to purport to explain the crisis without discussing fraud.

This post originally appeared on New Economic Perspectives.

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster William K. Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a white-collar criminologist and was a senior financial regulator. He is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.