Another interesting issue is: how big of a role does fraud play in financial crises? Walter Bagehot, a contemporary of Marx, and an interesting thinker on these matters, argued that in most financial debacles, mistakes are much more important than fraud. The reason is that it is hard to hide fraud, but mistakes are difficult to uncover, and, therefore, can go on longer and be more dangerous. I’m not sure that he was right. I think that most financial frauds start out as mistakes.

Hello:
I did not see there was a comment, so apologize for not answering sooner. The sentence is a quote from Marx, and not from me. In part five of volume three of Capital, Marx introduces financial circuits, among other things, into his analysis. I believe he assumes that capitalists self finance their accumulation in volumes I and II. This idea can easily be seen in his M-C-M’ circuit of capital. In it a capitalist starts with money capital (M) and uses it to purchase commodities (C) which are used to produce surplus value/profits. This yields a return revenue (M’) which is greater than the money capital advanced at the beginning of the circuit (M’>M). That revenue can then be used to continue the circuit on an expanded scale (M’-C-M”, etc).
In this circuit there can be no agency problems because the same person is investing the money capital, financing the operations, the wholesaler, and the retailer. In volume three, Marx introduces a lending system “subordinated” to capitalists. This means lenders provide a cheap and elastic supply of money capital for capitalists to use to expand their circuits. This introduces two new social classes (?)–the rentiers, who supply the savings and lenders who borrow the savings of rentiers to lend to capitalists. With these new social grouping, Marx argues, agency prop up–because a “large part of the social capital is employed by people who do not own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner.”
I argue that there are two principal agency problems that emerge–the rentier-banker agency problem and the banker-capitalist agency problem, and that these agency problems can erupt into crises. Marx seems to ignore the first, which I argue is the basis for understanding runs on the banking system, but has some interesting comments on the second.

Indeed, the relation between Individuals(agency) and structure has been one of the more relevant questions in the history of marxist thought, as Perry Anderson clearly shows in some of his books.

Regardin you sentence: These agency problems arose because a “large part of the social capital is employed by people who do not own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner.”

I would like you to clarify which is the relation that you establish between agency and structure in a marxian perspective.
Maria