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Re:The Big Zero by lionhearted on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @01:28PM (#1020962)
> There's a nice balance in there where the free market weeds out most problems, the government mops up mistakes that get by and regulation prevents those mistakes from growing into systemic risks.

You missed the largest problem - the Federal Reserve set the price of borrowing money artificially low, almost to the point of being free. Whenever you set the price of borrowing money (interest and fees) lower than the rate of inflation, you're going to get some sort of massive financial problem. It's in everyone's rational interest under that scenario to borrow as much as they can. Of course, that leads to catastrophe.

Re:The Big Zero by jbooth on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @01:32PM (#1020973)
That plus the large tax cuts aimed pretty much exclusively at the rich -- give all of the asset holders a bunch of extra liquidity and remove ordinary T-notes as an option by setting rates lower than inflation even while borrowing a ton of money..

You're gonna get a bubble somewhere -- that money has to go somewhere.

Re:The Big Zero by roc on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @01:52PM (#1021016)
But bubbles in and of themselves don't lead to the systemic crisis we just went through.

There were plenty of policies I disagreed with and plenty more that fueled the bubble. But I was talking specifically about the problems that lead to the credit crisis, paralyzed markets and generally gummed things up above and beyond a popped bubble.