2008 - so what really caused the meltdown?

Well I have been waiting for some explanation from American conservatives on what caused the 2008 meltdown.

I have finally found out.

It was, surprise, surprise, the US government's fault. Bankers were not gambling with their customers' savings and assets on imaginative (that is a cute word for it) derivatives and ridiculously overvalued properties.

Banks are of course part of the private sector, and should not take orders from the government. But when it came to handing out loans they were doing just that. The government wanted everyone to own property, even if people were incapable of paying for them. The banks were told, and sure enough dished out the loans without asking any questions, after all the properties would cover the costs, wouldn't they?

Sounds like real business practices - you do not try and make profits, you let people who cannot pay you back have the money! Yes, of course that is what you do .... No questions asked - ROTFLMAO!

Excuse me for smelling a rat with this argument. Today the British government (the extremely conservative British government NB) came up with a policy where banks should separate their investment arms from their retail arms - so there would be no more risk in the future of people losing their savings in, get this, the "casino economy"!

What "casino economy"? The banks were only doing what they were told, private institutions or not (cough, cough, splutter, splutter!).

And then there is the question why so many foreign banks lost huge sums of money in 2008. All the banks in Iceland, the leading banks in the Netherlands and Ireland, important financial institutions in the UK and Switzerland, even a couple in Germany, all were handing out loans irresponsibly to financially ill-equipped Americans to buy properties in the United States, because the American government told them to?

Huh?????

Well we may, unfortunately in this case (and others - see how we have given the Chinese government carte blanche to decide what happens in the world economically) have the "Global Economy", but since when has the US government had the right, or the gall, to tell private institutions outside their country that they must lend money to US citizens?

Or maybe this did not happen .....

And maybe, in fact probably, in fact extremely probably, the whole story is a red herring! The banks were acting irresponsibly, they were acting like they were in a casino, they were taking huge risks for which they were not adequately covered (see also the item, on banks still taking large uncovered risks, by financial analyst Richard Rodriguez a couple of weeks back), and without much assistance or advice from anywhere else, they brought the whole financial system crashing down!

It may not be a politically expedient argument for those who do not want to believe it, but it is the only one which matches the facts of the situation as it happened!