Who Caused the Economic Crisis?

[tongodeon]

The economic collapse is on everyone's mind and a major factor in the presidential election, and there are a lot of mistakes and distortions flying around especially with regard to how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were involved in the problems. The planetmoneymp3 podcast covered a lot of this ground this week. Here's my summary.

1. If the collapse is the fault of

Comments

[tongodeon]

Those of us who have been consistently warning about the looming financial meltdown while the asset bubbles were still inflating do not take any comfort at all in the knowledge that "pretty much everyone" is to blame for it.

This post was not written for the purposes of comforting you. If you seek comfort there are much better sources than my silly blog.

It would be nice, however, if the people who foresaw the crisis were on the short list of people we looked toward for observations about what else is foreseeable.

Like what? Is this about the IPv4 address space?

Where is your Faith In Great Leader....

[drieuxster]

Don't you understand that congress has already given the CIC all the war winning powers he needs, Thus under the unitary executive principle Paulson was working the war winningist strategy EVER!!!

Granted, there is the question of whether or not the concept of Shock Capitalism might be a bit more amusing now - since there is a thin window that we may abandon the predator state.... restore the very regulatory oversight that radical left wingers like the AEI have been preaching that they have been trying to impose since 2005....

Or we may just be lucky enough to get enough suckers to buy the common stock so that we can crash these puppies and bring on the great new free market...

[tongodeon]

"Nobody could have predicted..." Bullshit! A lot of us knew full well how the system was loaded with uncertainty and risk that weren't being managed by sane and competent people.

Who is actually claiming that this result was unpredictable? The only people I see saying that nobody could have predicted this are bloggers raising up the same straw man to mock how predictable the collapse was. There are a few columnists expressing their personal amazement - and I have no doubt that some private citizens are amazed - but I've never seen a direct quote from an actual policymaker saying that they were surprised by what's been happening. Weren't people talking about the similarities between our situation to The Great Depression over a year ago? Wasn't this the explicit point of appointing Bernanke? Everyone seems to have had a pretty good idea that this was a strong possibility for quite some time

[tongodeon]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html?hp