Was the FBI Too Busy to Fight Financial Crime?

The crisis panel report suggests the FBI may have been too overloaded to tackle white collar crimes.

Was the war on terror an aggravating factor in the financial crisis?

It seems a ridiculous question. Yet the FCIC entertains the question. From pp 162-163:

In 2005, 25,988 [suspicious activity reports] related to mortgage fraud were filed; in 2006, there were 37,457. The number kept climbing, to 52,862 in 2007, 65,004 in 2008, and 67,507 in 2009. At the same time, top FBI officials, focusing on terrorist threats, reduced the agents assigned to white-collar crime from 2,342 in the 2004 fiscal year to fewer than 2,000 by 2007. That year, its mortgage fraud program had only 120 agents at any one time to review more than 50,000 [suspicious activity reports]...

Robert Mueller, the FBI’s director since 2001 said mortgage fraud needed to be considered “in context of other priorities,” such as terrorism.

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