llinois, New Mexico, and South Carolina have yet to release their annual financial reports of the fiscal year ending last June. These late financial statements create a lack of transparency which, in some ways, is reminiscent of the savings and loan crisis a few decades ago.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, taxpayers paid massive clean-up costs to deal with pervasive failures of savings and loan institutions around the country.  This episode taught us some lessons about the role and moral hazard of government in financial markets that we may have forgotten.  In recent years we endured another financial and economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, partly due to our failure to learn and apply those lessons.