Financial deregulation can increase systemic risk

Quality and quantity of direct evidence for or against the claim — RCTs, systematic reviews, natural experiments, large cohort studies.

Reinhart & Rogoff's eight-century crisis database and the FCIC's 2011 report documenting deregulation-driven causes provide strong, historically deep support.

Whether the proposed mechanism is valid and established — does the how make sense, or are there fundamental flaws in the causal logic?

Admati & Hellwig's leverage-and-risk-taking mechanism is well-established: relaxed capital constraints predictably increase bank risk-taking, privatizing gains while socializing tail losses.

Degree of agreement among domain experts and relevant scientific or policy bodies — depth and quality of consensus, not just majority opinion.

Broad agreement among financial economists that deregulation contributed materially to 2008 and historical crisis patterns, following the FCIC's bipartisan investigation.

Whether findings hold across independent studies, populations, and contexts — resistance to p-hacking and publication bias.

The liberalization-precedes-crisis pattern replicates across Kaminsky & Reinhart's cross-country twin-crises analysis and the historical record spanning centuries.