fjl2nd Posted October 29, 2012 Author Share Posted October 29, 2012 Rather than hand out reading assignments, how about summarising for the purpose of this discussion? I haven't even finished reading the damn thing. Haha. There are plenty of reviews and critiques of the book online. I'll give you my full take after I'm done. It's hard to do extra reading when I have so much other stuff to do for school. But, if you look at the recession and crisis from a logical point of view, there were a lot of factors that would seem to add up to a slow recovery. The foreclosing of tons of homes, the massive pile of debt on consumers, and technological advances creating higher unemployment. A lot of different structural issues. Everything seemed to go wrong at once. We are seeing signs in most areas now. I am still worried about the regulation of banks to prevent another crisis again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OCinBuffalo Posted October 29, 2012 Share Posted October 29, 2012 (edited) Everything seemed to go wrong at once. We are seeing signs in most areas now. I am still worried about the regulation of banks to prevent another crisis again. First, there can be no doubt about the uniqueness of the financial crisis. And, with it came a unique political trap: do you let the housing market bottom out, because that's what a market has to do, or, do you keep people in their homes? There is no good answer there. We chose the first one, and it has kept housing, a key factor in recovery, from recovering. OTOH, politically, at the time, Obama had to know that opting to throw people out of their homes for cold market calculation, would have lost him both houses in 2010. Not to mention the very real social costs of losing homes. I'm not blaming Obama for this. There was no good answer. It turns out he lost one house anyway, but that was due to stupidity in other areas(Obamacare). Second, the current status of the banks is completely unacceptable. We cannot have "too big to fail" banks, period. Also, we MUST stop Bernanke form lending banks $ for 0% interest. These banks are not lending. This is not working. Instead of lending money to businesses, homeowners and car owners, they are making money off taking that free money and doing deals(trades, etc.) with it. Now, I don't blame them in a sense: they aren't going to make reasonable profit, that their shareholders demand, off of .5% interest loans, and certainly not as much as they can with the deals they are doing. Edited October 29, 2012 by OCinBuffalo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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