Obama was not the origin of the 2008 meltdown. Sure, he contributed to unqualified lending. But the center of our modern meltdowns is the central bank - i.e. Federal Reserve.
The pre-Fed era generally did not feature economy-wide meltdowns. When bank panics occurred in the 19th century (outside of the prior central banks, the first a…
Obama was not the origin of the 2008 meltdown. Sure, he contributed to unqualified lending. But the center of our modern meltdowns is the central bank - i.e. Federal Reserve.
The pre-Fed era generally did not feature economy-wide meltdowns. When bank panics occurred in the 19th century (outside of the prior central banks, the first and second), you will find state-level fractional reserve banking and unjustified legal protections of that practice. But even with that, the greatest period of wealth creation in this country followed the Civil War and continued until the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act.
I don't know a lot, granted. But my understanding is that the *big* problems started happening in '95, when The Fed decided they were smart enough they could actually *control the economy.* That's how dumb they were. And if anything untoward popped up, they had all the tools to *fix* it all up. No problemo. AFAIK, they just didn't know when to *stop* fixing things.
The rest, as they say, is history. Actually, that's about all I know about it, FWIW.
I've done quite a bit of reading on this, and the economic structure that allowed the meltdown to occur is as you stated. But the trigger event is most definitely the agreement between banks and the Clinton administration in response to the Obama class action lawsuit.
Without that agreement, sub-prime loans never emerge, no risk mitigation is needed and mortgage derivatives are never developed, loan defaults don't occur, bank capital does not get hammered, and the credit market doesn't freeze.
Obama was not the origin of the 2008 meltdown. Sure, he contributed to unqualified lending. But the center of our modern meltdowns is the central bank - i.e. Federal Reserve.
The pre-Fed era generally did not feature economy-wide meltdowns. When bank panics occurred in the 19th century (outside of the prior central banks, the first and second), you will find state-level fractional reserve banking and unjustified legal protections of that practice. But even with that, the greatest period of wealth creation in this country followed the Civil War and continued until the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act.
See Mises.org to start your education.
I don't know a lot, granted. But my understanding is that the *big* problems started happening in '95, when The Fed decided they were smart enough they could actually *control the economy.* That's how dumb they were. And if anything untoward popped up, they had all the tools to *fix* it all up. No problemo. AFAIK, they just didn't know when to *stop* fixing things.
The rest, as they say, is history. Actually, that's about all I know about it, FWIW.
I've done quite a bit of reading on this, and the economic structure that allowed the meltdown to occur is as you stated. But the trigger event is most definitely the agreement between banks and the Clinton administration in response to the Obama class action lawsuit.
Without that agreement, sub-prime loans never emerge, no risk mitigation is needed and mortgage derivatives are never developed, loan defaults don't occur, bank capital does not get hammered, and the credit market doesn't freeze.