In this seminar, Tamim Bayoumi will present the argument of his recent book called Unfinished Business: the Unexplored Consequences of the Financial Crisis and the Lessons Yet to be Learned. There have been numerous books examining the 2008 financial crisis from either a U.S. or European perspective, but Bayoumi is the first to suggest that the Euro crisis and U.S. housing crash were deeply intertwined. In his book, he traces how it was that under-regulated trading between European and U.S. banks led to a crisis. Starting in the 1980s, Bayoumi outlines the cumulative policy errors that undermined the stability of both the European and U.S. financial sectors, highlighting the catalytic role played by European mega banks that exploited lax regulation to expand into the U.S. market and financed unsustainable bubbles on both continents. U.S. banks increasingly sold sub-par loans to under-regulated European and U.S. shadow banks and, when the bubbles burst, the losses whipsawed back to the core of the European banking system. Bayoumi concludes that policy makers are ignorant of what still needs to be done both to complete the cleanup and to prevent future crises of a similar kind.