"Boy, I hate this continent and its unwillingness to learn from past mistakes..."
Just so you know, the grass ain't greener on the other side of the pond.
It has taken 16 years +/- for us in the US to get into the bind we're in. It started with feel-good efforts on the part of the "urban renewal" crowd to make credit available to uncreditworthy consumers. Then investors of every stripe, foreign and domestic, started to see the profits roll in and everyone jumped on the bus. Remember, too, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both hybrids -- the product of an unholy alliance between the private and public sectors that began as an experiment and whose results are plain to see.
I guess all I'm trying to say here is that the parallels between our Great Depression of the 1930's and today's financial debacle were there for everyone to see and act upon. Some actually made great noises about it but were marginalized in favor of the present-tense profits. No one chose to do avert the train wreck; to get between constituents and their paper has been verboten on a number of levels. So here we sit. And the rats are scurrying for cover.
"Boy, I hate this continent and its unwillingness to learn from past mistakes..."
Just so you know, the grass ain't greener on the other side of the pond.
It has taken 16 years +/- for us in the US to get into the bind we're in. It started with feel-good efforts on the part of the "urban renewal" crowd to make credit available to uncreditworthy consumers. Then investors of every stripe, foreign and domestic, started to see the profits roll in and everyone jumped on the bus. Remember, too, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both hybrids -- the product of an unholy alliance between the private and public sectors that began as an experiment and whose results are plain to see.
I guess all I'm trying to say here is that the parallels between our Great Depression of the 1930's and today's financial debacle were there for everyone to see and act upon. Some actually made great noises about it but were marginalized in favor of the present-tense profits. No one chose to do avert the train wreck; to get between constituents and their paper has been verboten on a number of levels. So here we sit. And the rats are scurrying for cover.