The causes of the 2008 financial crisis have never been satisfactorily explained. The Obama administration, upon taking office in January 2009, immediately adopted the idea that the crisis was caused by insufficient regulation of the financial system and proceeded to press for the enactment of the stringent new financial regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act. However, there is powerful evidence that the crisis was caused by US government housing policies, which built a massive housing price bubble based on subprime mortgages. When the bubble collapsed, banks and other financial firms were severely weakened by accounting policies pursued by the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board. When the these policies were reversed, in March 2009, the economy began to recover. In this lecture and an accompanying text, Peter J. Walllison, the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: What Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again, (Encounter Books, 2015) explains both the causes of the crisis and the accounting policies that made it worse.