In the US, those that just repeat what "Conservative talking heads" write or say are called "Ditto Heads". The law encouraging mortgages to low income earners, which is referred by some as "government intervention", is / was not the cause of bank failures.
It is widely believed that, Derivatives and other risky instruments that banks and other financial entities (like brokerage and insurance companies) developed and widely used, to leverage themselves, that caused the financial failures. Those practices exposed the financial entities to far greater risk than giving sub-prime loans. Adding to the above practices and risks, William Black states in "The Audacity of Dopes" the following. "Over the last few decades, the executive compensation and the compensation systems used for appraisers, accountants, and rating agencies were designed, and served, to create the perverse incentives and ethical rot that caused the ongoing financial crises by producing a "Gresham's dynamic" in which fraudulent and abusive lending and accounting practices drove good practices out of the marketplace." Others have described banks as institutions that practiced "giant ponzi schemes". Let's not tell the above to the "talking heads". For these "talking heads" and their followers, politicizing very issue is the name of the game. William Black is Associate Professor, University of Missouri, was the senior regulator during S&L debacle.. Alan Greenspan who permitted the development of Derivatives and other such debt instruments has take responsibility for his role in this debacle. Greenspan estimates the total amount of derivatives worldwide at eighty trillion dollars (80 Trillion US dollars) http://www.usagold.com/greenspanderivatives.html Regards, GL --------- edward desilva Just because you got a cut and paste job, that does not mean that it is a fact. In UK at the moment the HBOS whistleblower said that the Banks were at fault NOT THE GOVT. And he is going to produce a 30 page dossier for the MPs. Facts speak for themselves, not some back street newspaper BS.. ---------- Mario Goveia: What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market's "greed." That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case..
