[AndyJackson]

The fact of the matter is that Democrats caused the beginnings of this crisis by demanding that people who had bad credit be given mortgages....This crisis was not caused by a lack of government intervention. The crisis was caused by too much government intervention.

Actually, this idiot is spreading HS. First, the idiots on wall street did not exactly spend a lot of money lobbying against subprime mortgages. WS knows how to meet a requirement with minimal compliance when they choose. Second, subprime is but the tip of the iceberg of 3 decades of financial excess.

Whether or not we have a policy of sound money is squarely under the control of the government. That the Congress, the treasury and the Federal Reserve all went along with the creation and extension of the biggest financial bubble in history is squarely on their shoulders. While banks want the government out of their affairs, they still want first dibs on the freshly minted money.

[sirchtruth]

First, the idiots on wall street did not exactly spend a lot of money lobbying against subprime mortgages.

Subprime mortgages are not the problem, it's all a matter of affordability and dumbass buyers. Why would WS lobby against them? Freddie and Fannie are so culpable in this mess it should make everybody's head spin!

[budwiesest]

tip of the iceberg of 3 decades of financial excess.

Greenspan to Bernanke- the fed was pumping out dollars at a rate where people had no choice but to take it, and park 'it' somewhere (turned out to be housing and 2nd mortgages). "POP!"

Why all the surprise? Nothing can go up forever. Bad loans within the bubble may have pierced it, however, at some point it would have blowed-up under it's own weight.

[Sherman Logan]

Thanks for posting some common sense on this issue.

Subprime mortgages were the root cause, and their creation was indeed encouraged by government, especially liberals.

The market then took these mortgages and played games with them, creating monetary instruments that nobody really understood. In the process they inflated the actual risk by somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, we cannot blame this mess entirely or even largely on the government. The primary perps are the people the market rewarded most extravagantly over the last couple decades.

The theory that markets do not do stupid things does not hold up historically. The difference between markets and governments is that markets always self-correct in the long run. Governments can keep tossing money down a hole almost indefinitely, as long as they have a semi-functioning economy to plunder.

As the Soviet Union did. They only collapsed when their economy went from 50% efficient to 25% efficient.