What types of consumer protections should have been in place to prevent the massive collapse of these institutions in the future?Our financial...

I do not think that there should have been any further
consumer protection laws in place.  The only way to prevent this sort of thing is to
have better consumer
education.

One of the reasons
why there was so much subprime lending is that people wanted that.  They wanted to be
able to buy houses even if they were not really creditworthy and the government
supported that because it felt that people owning homes rather than renting is a good
thing.  Most of the people who ended up in bad loans were complicit rather than innocent
victims who got fooled.

The other problem is that people
did not really understand that housing prices were in a bubble.  They voluntarily took
things like mortgages with balloon payments because they were sure their house values
would increase and they could refinance.  This is something that cannot be cured by
consumer protection laws.

Much of what happened to cause
the collapse was caused by people willingly taking loans they should not have taken.  If
the banks had not loaned to them, they would have been angry and put pressure on the
politicians to loosen the rules.  It is very hard to protect people from their own
desires.  Therefore, I do not think any further consumer protection laws should have
been in place.