Me neither and I am still learning and have a bunch more to understand. But some parts of it are simple. Gramm, Greenspan, and some of Obama’s crew should have known better than to do what they did. They relied on the market to police itself and that just isn’t going to happen over the long haul. never has. never will.
Like the article this thread references, rising asset prices should have been a clue. Putting Glass-Steagall back means banks can be depository banks, like for human beings or they can be investment banks that do all the high finance stuff and are riskier. That means they will not be too big to fail, and if they do they don’t take the whole system with them.
On top of all this, there were side bets on the economy by people who had no interest in the transactions. Like insurance. But whereas the only people who are interested in insuring our house is us and the mortgage company, they let anybody bet on the deal. Imagine if an ex-wife had a bet that your house was going to burn down. And most of this seems to have been off exchanges where nobody knew who had what.
You just have to read up this stuff and those links are good places to start. I’m still trying to understand all the machinations.
parsy.
Well, that is not exactly overflowing with detail... actually, most were anxious to make deals and money on transactions during this period. The problem is that most of the profit was bogus (through bad real estate deals or the selling of such), so it really does still go back to those the allowed this to happen.
You keep looking at the results of these actions rather that the cause. Yes, there were lots of unscrupulous actions by banks and other institutions because of this. You unfortunately keep blaming those that took advantage of it rather than those that caused it.
I still say that 90% of the problem was government active action in the real estate market which caused banks to actively take on those poor risk loans (because they were backed by government) and eventually put themselves at risk because of these actions. This in turn caused a downturn in the general stock market (because so many large firms invested in sordid real estate loans) which caused a major crash or depression.
You know...while I was trying to understand YOU... I have to confess that you are a bit of a strange character. An unknown regardless of your long association with Free Republic. I wonder just where you are on most subjects - at this point.
From looking at your previous comments, I would suggest that you are a middle of the road Republican who supports McClain. If I’m wrong, please correct me.
With that, that means that you are NOT a conservative, but a moderate that is trying to belong here.. Where do you belong on the political spectrum - you get to decide?