So your argument is "sure, the housing bubble popped and the sCDO market actually did cause the overleveraging that made it a Great Recession instead of a normal bust, but I can take it a step farther back and point at something that may or may not have moved the tipping point to an earlier spot on the timeline than it would otherwise have been, so I'm calling that the cause."
Why not regress a few more steps and say that the Great Recession was caused by the formation of OPEC? There are an infinite number of things that could have averted the series of events that led to the economic collapse. That doesn't make any of them the proximate cause. The proximate cause was the overleveraging; without that, none of the economic damage caused by the other circumstances would have shut down the global economy. Thus, synthetic collateralized debt obligations a.k.a. finance-market shenanigans are responsible.
[Politics] Economic Schools Debates
Moderator: Moderators
Plus, if oil prices were the cause of the collapse, that would mean that the mortgages, the CDOs based on them, the CDSes sold on the CDOs, and the synthetic CDOs based on the CDSes were all good ideas until the price of oil went up.
That's fucking nuts. Those investments weren't even risky, they were guaranteed to fail. There is no price of gasoline under which a farmworker making $15k a year can possibly pay off a $750,000 loan in 30 years. Especially not when the payments quadruple after two years.
That's fucking nuts. Those investments weren't even risky, they were guaranteed to fail. There is no price of gasoline under which a farmworker making $15k a year can possibly pay off a $750,000 loan in 30 years. Especially not when the payments quadruple after two years.
I'm saying it wouldn't have mattered how your economy was structured when oil prices did what they did, because the economy is so tightly coupled to oil use. As the giant bankers' pyramid scheme it was, or something more rational, everything comes down.
What it was required that the constant growth in money supply via growth in net loans to pay down the previous round of loans, but so does anything else, that all had to be repaid by burning more oil year-on-year regardless of what you're producing, including ever more costly oil to cover very old loans. At least until you decouple your economy from burning oil, which you are ever more lagging the world on.
Again, you can decouple, but it costs years and years of national energy outputs to do. It doesn't bootstrap without oil, and when the fracing winds down it won't matter what new game the bankers are playing, you can either run any sort of economy on solar or you can't run an economy of any modern sort at all.
The price shocks of 2007-2008 are just a preview of a permanent future.
What it was required that the constant growth in money supply via growth in net loans to pay down the previous round of loans, but so does anything else, that all had to be repaid by burning more oil year-on-year regardless of what you're producing, including ever more costly oil to cover very old loans. At least until you decouple your economy from burning oil, which you are ever more lagging the world on.
Again, you can decouple, but it costs years and years of national energy outputs to do. It doesn't bootstrap without oil, and when the fracing winds down it won't matter what new game the bankers are playing, you can either run any sort of economy on solar or you can't run an economy of any modern sort at all.
The price shocks of 2007-2008 are just a preview of a permanent future.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.