Re: Banking Recession
"Actually, much of the recession in the US was caused by the government REQUIRING banks to write high-risk loans."
This is repeated by right-wingers (gummint shouldn't lend to poor people) but as Gillian Tett so forensically analysed it in her book Fool's Gold what actually caused the crisis was a lethal combination of investors demanding low risk (AAA) investments, oversupply of high end property developments like condos in Florida, and the banks deciding that mortgages could be repackaged as investments. It wasn't the high risk debt to poor people that caused the crisis - most of them repaid because they were honest as well as poor - but the fact that investments labelled low risk were actually very high risk because of falling prices, and the rating agencies didn't notice. It was the big crooks caused the crisis.
Tett is a social anthropologist as well as a financial journalist and she exposes the extremely toxic banking culture.
The government had to step in and fix the problems in the end. In this particular case the problem may turn out to be a stock market crash as the overvaluing of the Internet-based companies is more and more exposed, and fixing Pai won't fix that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
