Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson Blames...

Krishna Guha of the Financial Times reports that is a valedictory interview, Mr. Paulson said that

in the years leading up to the crisis, super-abundant savings from fast-growing emerging nations such as China and oil exporters – at a time of low inflation and booming trade and capital flows – put downward pressure on yields and risk spreads everywhere...Excesses...built up for a long time, [with] investors looking for yield, mis-pricing risk. It could take different forms. For some of the European banks it was eastern Europe. Spain and the UK were much more like the US with housing being the biggest bubble. With Japan it may be banks continuing to invest in equities.

Mr. Paulson said the solution was better global macroeconomic cooperation, better regulation and risk pricing.

I have briefly looked for a transcript of the interview and could not find it. Perhaps in the full text he stated how a need for better regulation springs from the root causes he names, certainly regulators erred in pricing risk as did investors. Hazarding another guess, from a U.S. perspective, perhaps by global macroeconomic cooperation, he means pegging Asian exchange rates differently so as to generate fewer imports, more exports, and less net capital inflows.