This is deceptive. The cause of the 08 crash was the sub-prime mortgage bubble popping. The cause of the sub-prime mortgage bubble popping, was the US Government pumping up the sub-prime mortgage bubble untill it popped. The cause of the bubble popping at that particular time may well have been the Fed’s effect on the liquidity of the banking system; that is not so easy to tell. But when you inflate a bubble like that, you make the crash inevitable. Only the timing can yet be influenced.
The author is knowledgeable about economics so his chatter sounds like it must be informed. Your analysis is correct however and his is wrong.
Government forced sub-prime market collapsed and then hidden killer trades and movements to kick the wobbly legs and bring it all down. Lots of misdirection since.
I agree. The crash had roots going back many years, and a number of factors came together to produce it. Community Housing (bad mortgages) and securitization (banks and mortgage companies made crappy loans, but packaged them and sold them to someone else)are two bit ones.
One of the best books I read on the crash was "The Sellout", by Charles Gasparino, which traces the roots of the crash back to the 80's. It reads like both a history book and a thriller. Highly recommended.
All true. The fact that the big investment houses we all too willing to package and sell all that bad debt didn't help things any though.
I really doubt Bush or Bernanke or anybody else engineered the collapse to put Obama in the White House. Would Bush have been unhappier with McCain as a successor than with Obama? Would Bernanke? Democrats could prevent housecleaning at Fannie and Freddy, but could they really have triggered a precisely-timed collapse? No, some kind of crash-landing was probably inevitable at some point.
Heres a link to a Village Voice piece from 2008 which lays the responsibility on Andrew Cuomo.