Com­ment: There is a mil­i­tary slang acronym “BOHICA,” which stands for “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”

“Econ­o­mists: Another Finan­cial Cri­sis on the Way” by Matthew Jaffe; ABC News; 3/2/2010.

Even as many Amer­i­cans still strug­gle to recover from the country’s worst eco­nomic down­turn since the Great Depres­sion, another cri­sis – one that will be even worse than the cur­rent one – is loom­ing, accord­ing to a new report from a group of lead­ing econ­o­mists, financiers, and for­mer fed­eral regulators.

In the report, the panel, which includes Rob John­son of the United Nations Com­mis­sion of Experts on Finance and bailout watch­dog Eliz­a­beth War­ren, warns that finan­cial reg­u­la­tory reform mea­sures pro­posed by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion and Con­gress must be beefed up to pre­vent banks from con­tin­u­ing to engage in high-risk invest­ing that pre­cip­i­tated the near-collapse of the U.S. econ­omy in 2008.

The report warns that the coun­try is now immersed in a “dooms­day cycle” wherein banks use bor­rowed money to take mas­sive risks in an attempt to pay big div­i­dends to share­hold­ers and big bonuses to man­age­ment – and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive tax­payer bailouts from the government.

“Risk-taking at banks,” the report cau­tions, “will soon be larger than ever.”

With­out more strin­gent reforms, “another cri­sis – a big­ger cri­sis that weak­ens both our finan­cial sec­tor and our larger econ­omy – is more than pre­dictable, it is inevitable,” John­son says in the report, com­mis­sioned by the non­par­ti­san Roo­sevelt Institute.

The institute’s chief econ­o­mist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, calls the report “an impor­tant point of depar­ture for a debate on where we are on the road to reg­u­la­tory reform.” . . .