Markets are Efficient if and Only if P = NP

Re:Markets are Efficient if and Only if P = NP by CWuestefeld on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @04:55PM (#2896926)

I think the parent post overstates it a bit. I wouldn't say that the Fed was a primary cause, although they were certainly complicit by keeping interest rates so low, artificially increasing the demand for mortgages.

If you're willing to generalize the comment to say that the crisis was primarily due to the heavy hand of the federal government, then I offer these two links. They're both op-ed pieces, so shouldn't be considered definitive research, but they're pretty solid evidence that some serious people do blame the government's regulation (as opposed to de-regulation).

1. A Government-Mandated Housing Bubble http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-opi...

2. How Government Stoked the Mania http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122298982558700341.html

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Re:Markets are Efficient if and Only if P = NP by arethuza on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @05:22PM (#2897000)

Ok - I can see that those articles make some good points about the US housing market. However, I am not in the US, and the housing market in the UK suffered from very similar problems and, as far as I am aware, we never had any overt government support for mortgages so our mortage market looked rather more "free market" than the US one and we still ended up with similar problems. Northern Rock being the most obvious example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Rock

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